


The Tree Of Life

by mad_martha



Series: Checkmate Series [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-27
Updated: 2011-05-27
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:13:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 39,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/204771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_martha/pseuds/mad_martha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ron and Harry join forces to do some friends a favour, and Ron learns the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure who to acknowledge here as it's hard to find a reference to this show anywhere, but Gnashes the pterodactyl is borrowed from an old British children's TV puppet-show called "Oscar the Rabbit". And I'd like to thank Dan Brown and "The Da Vinci Code" for inspiring all the wordy exposition in this instalment of the saga.
> 
> At the beginning of this series I didn't have any idea what was going on in this universe, and it stayed that way for quite a while; now I have ideas but I will be utterly up front and say that as far as I'm concerned plot very much gives way to relationship in this series. This really is all about the Harry/Ron and what they get up to together, hence the higher ratings for this series. There's also a strong pagan overtone to this - I'm not sure how that happened, but it seems to work so I'm running with it. And finally: for anyone who was wondering what happened to Hermione in this series, you'll get an answer now.

**Part 1**

Considering that really his everyday life was oh-so-boring, it seemed to Ron that he managed to pack more than his fair share of weirdness into it.  So much so, in fact, that he had come to realise that the true weirdness was just how mundane the odd stuff could seem while it was happening.

Take his job at the twins' shop in Diagon Alley.  Who would have thought that working in a joke shop would not only be boring (someone had to sweep the floors, after all, and Ron was that someone) but annoying beyond measure?  Admittedly Ron himself had never had any trouble envisaging the annoying part - growing up with the twins made this aspect more than plausible - but he hadn't given much thought to how the customers would factor into that.  He had assumed, as did many people not involved in the sharp end of the retail business, that the customers would come into the shop, select the goods they wanted, pay and then leave.  On the rare occasion that this actually happened, Ron was tempted to kiss them and give them a discount.  The rest of the time he simmered furiously behind his best cool Slytherin face while he answered rude and asinine questions, chased random products around the shop floor that had been released by unsupervised children, mopped up spills and nursed the inevitable injuries that could result from handling some of the products.

Mostly he tolerated it all.  But only days after he returned to the shop following his mixed Christmas celebrations (the good part spent with Harry and the not-so-good part spent with his family), he fell out with the twins and found himself out of a job.  This was not entirely unexpected; in fact, Ron had been expecting to fall out with the twins and be fired from the first day he put on his Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes apron.  What he hadn't expected was such difficulty in finding another job, and when he did find another job he certainly hadn't expected it to be fixing broken sex toys and other dubious equipment at a notorious gay nightclub.

And that naturally led to the discovery that perversion was remarkably banal up close, especially when one didn't share any of the kinks on offer.  Ron spent less than four weeks expanding his mind and wearying his world view while he mended dildoes and rescued both staff and clients from defective chastity-belts.  Then his world tilted on its axis once more with the eruption of his feisty little grandmother into the delinquent portals of the Pink Kneazle Wizards' Club, and once more he was out of a job.

At least on this occasion it was no fault of his own and the management had no complaints whatsoever about him.  Ron wasn't sure just what sort of position their reference would get him, but it was probably better than nothing.

It did leave him wondering what was going to happen to him now, as he trailed Lillian Prewett up a lamp-lit Diagon Alley.

"You're coming home with me," she told him out of the blue, just as though she'd read his mind.  Given her former profession, Ron couldn't be entirely sure that she _hadn't_.

"And do what?" he asked, unable to keep a touch of scepticism out of his voice.  He was more than a little annoyed with her.  Getting him sacked was taking grandparental privilege a little far, fond though he was of her.

She sniffed.  "That manager tells me you've been mending things."

"I told you that."

"Then you can come and mend things for me, can't you?  And you can help me in my garden.  I've been thinking for a while now that I need a strapping grandson about the place to dig the borders and do the pruning."  Before he could counter this, she added, "And it'll do you the world of good to be out from under your mother's roof for a while."

"I don't think Mum'll agree with you," he muttered.

"You let me worry about that!"

Ron was silent for a while, considering this.  He suspected his mother would be more than a little aggravated by the interference, but he couldn't see what he had to lose by going along with his grandmother.  He didn't mind sorting out her garden for her if that was what she wanted; it wasn't as though he had anything better to do with himself now that he was unemployed, and perhaps in the meantime a better selection of jobs would come up in the _Prophet._

"You have your whole future in front of you," she continued, still in the rather tart give-me-no-nonsense tone she'd been using since she arrived at the Club's back door.  "It seems to me that your parents haven't been keeping as sharp an eye on it as they should lately, so you'll come and stay with me for a while and let me take care of it."

 Ron eyed her with instinctive wariness.  He rather thought that looking after his future - no matter how dreary and menial it might be - was _his_ business.

"I can look after myself you know, Gran."

The look she gave him was withering, even in the artificial light of the street-lamps.

 

~~~

 

Ron had been told that his grandmother had 'retired' as a professional seer and clairvoyant when he was a little boy, and snatches of conversation overheard over the years had yielded the further information that she'd had some sort of falling out with at least one other seer that had led to her retreat from professional prognostication.

The truth of this story remained a mystery.  His grandmother wouldn't talk about it other than to assure him that she got along "very well indeed, thank you, with all the people who matter", which to a Slytherin like Ron left a lot of room for interpretation.  While working in her overgrown cottage garden he came to the conclusion that she probably _had_ fallen out with someone important.  For all that she was a sweet little old lady whom he liked very much, in his estimation only an idiot could fail to notice the toughness and determination that lay underneath her fluffy, birdlike appearance.  He wondered who had fallen foul of the infamous Prewett temper and what sort of injuries they'd dragged away from the encounter.  The idea made him grin to himself sometimes.

If she had retired, it was only from doing readings and so on for paying customers.  She had a room set aside for her divinatory work and spent a great deal of time in there; and while he was curious to know what she was doing, Ron was uneasy enough around any kind of divination that he didn't try very hard to find out.  He made himself useful around the cottage and steered clear of her study.

The rest of the family seemed to regard the old lady's appropriation of Ron with some mild consternation.  No one actually tried to make him go home, but his mother Floo-called on his first evening at the cottage with stern and slightly anxious instructions to him to call home every couple of days, and rather bizarrely his Uncle Gideon turned up the next day, shuffling nervously under his mother's beady-eyed welcome and cornering Ron in the herb patch to ask if everything was all right.  Hard upon this came an owl from the twins, demanding to know if he'd become a pansy-arsed tea-leaf reader and predicting that he'd soon be begging them for his job back.  Another arrived from Bill, sounding rather more amused than everyone else, also asking if his little brother had decided to make a living from reading crystal balls.  This might have annoyed Ron had it not been for one particular line: _Everyone seems to think that Gran has abducted you and no one listens when I tell them you probably didn't mind, but what I don't get is why anyone's surprised that you'd chuck a job with the twins for just about anything else!_   More helpfully, he finished with: _When you're ready to look for another job, let me know - I can put you in touch with people._

Ron mentioned this to his grandmother, but when she vetoed the idea on the grounds that _the ether is shifting!_ he didn't argue with her.  He was content to tend her garden, do her shopping, mend the tiles in her bathroom, and help serve tea to her dotty friends, at least for the time being.  He was living there for nothing, after all.

It was only at night, when he was lying awake in the chintzy guest bedroom, that he succumbed to a kind of melancholy; and if that melancholy had a name, it would be Harry.

 

~~~

 

January was already frosting, hailing and blustering itself out by the time Ron arrived at the little cottage and February blew its way in within a week.  The night of the first of February - Imbolc, according to the traditions of the wizard Wicca - was a particularly exciting one, attended by storms and high winds that took more than a couple of tiles off the cottage roof.  Typically, the following morning was damp but calm and full of ridiculously brilliant sunshine, so Ron put on an old cloak, borrowed a broom from the garden shed and went up on the roof to repair the damage before they ran out of buckets to catch the leaks.  Halfway through the morning he heard the chime of the Floo, but when his grandmother didn't summon him he carried on with what he was doing.

Perhaps an hour later he finished the job and flew back down to the ground.  He put the broom and tools back in the shed and went indoors, hanging his cloak on a hook by the kitchen door and going over to the range to fill the kettle and hang it over the fire.  He wondered if his grandmother had guests and if he should make up a tea tray.  In the end he took his boots off, which were damp and smeared with moss, and padded through the cottage in his socks to see what was going on.

Unusually, the voices were coming from the little conservatory beyond the study, although her usual divinatory aids were set out on the table in the middle of the room.  Ron paused uncertainly, wondering if he should interrupt.  Then he noticed a large tray on the table and froze.

Lillian Prewett didn't make much use of the more common divinatory tools such as crystal balls; she preferred a deep square tray filled with sand in which she placed a number of rune-counters that would move and make patterns in the sand for her to read.  Ron didn't pretend to understand how it worked, but he recognised one of the patterns in it only too well.  Most of the wooden counters were lined up along the sides of the tray in various configurations, while two of them lay in the middle having drawn a complete design in the sand; a small-scale reproduction of the birthmark that covered Ron's back from his shoulders to his waist.

Just seeing the pattern there made the real mark on his back itch, especially as Ron himself had never seen his birthmark completely - only partial reflections in mirrors which he usually made a point of avoiding if he could.

Until now, despite Harry describing it to him, he hadn't really believed that it looked like a bird.  But it did - a bird with outstretched wings and a long fanned tail - and so much so that he was stunned.  Now he understood why Maevi of the Running Hare Coven had told him that it couldn't possibly have been made by accident; if the image in the sand tray was accurate, then it didn't look like something natural at all but more like a tattoo.

The conservatory door clicked open, making him jump and whip around to look.

"There you are!"  His grandmother bustled out, all busy impatience like his mother on laundry day.  "Get your things!"

"What?" Ron asked blankly.  He looked past her and his eyes widened when a familiar figure appeared in the doorway.

James Potter rested one shoulder against the doorpost and returned his gaze with a blandly neutral look.

"Yes, yes, all of your things!" Lillian Prewett fussed.  "Where are your boots?  Your cloak?  You don't have all day, you know!"

"All day for what, Gran?"

"You're coming with me," James clarified, "and we've got a way to go, so we ought to get started."

"I am?  We have?"  Ron eyed him warily.

"Well, not if you don't want to."  James shrugged.  "It's up to you.  But I think Harry'll be disappointed if you don't."

"You didn't think you were going to stay here for the rest of your days, did you?" his grandmother put in.  She gave an exasperated cluck.  "Don't be silly, dear!  There are much more important things for you to do with your life.  Even a _Muggle_ could look after my garden!"

Not a remark calculated to raise his self-esteem, but she didn't give him time to absorb it.

"Hurry along!  Get your things!  You can take that broom from the shed, the one under the oilskin cover.  It's your Uncle Fabian's, but he can buy himself another one."

Ron thought that his Uncle Fabian might have something to say about that when he found out, but that wasn't his problem.  He was in the spare room and gathering up his things before he knew it, and he was hunting around for his spare robe before it suddenly dawned on him that he was going to see Harry again sooner than he hoped for.

But where _was_ Harry?  And what was he doing?

 

~~~

 

James was close-mouthed on these points, though.  He was happy to talk about just about anything else, and with relentless good humour spouted Quidditch scores and political gossip like a columnist for the _Daily Prophet_ until Ron was ready to beg him to shut up, but any hint of where his son and friends were remained firmly off-topic.

He had plenty of time to talk.  From Lillian Prewett's cottage he side-along Apparated Ron to a disused stairwell at the nearest railway station, where he bought tickets for them both to a northern town that Ron had never heard of.  Not that knowing the town would have helped him much, because they disembarked several stops before their supposed destination and Apparated to another town, emerging behind the toilet block at a bus station and catching a bus to yet another place that Ron had never heard of.

"Why didn't we stay on the bus?" he asked finally, when they escaped their fellow travellers at a motorway services stop after an hour or so.

James was rummaging for something in a pocket of his robe.  "Did you see that bloke in the green jacket on the train?  Sitting opposite us?"

Ron frowned.  "Yeah, I think so."

"And did you see the bloke with the blue baseball cap at the station when we got off the train?"

"Er ... no, I wasn't looking."

"You're going to have to learn to look," James said matter-of-factly.  "It was the same bloke.  He was at the bus station too, but we dodged him there."

Ron felt a nasty crawling sensation up his spine.  "Are we being followed?"

"Son, I'm _always_ being followed."  James found what he was looking for; a small piece of stone carved into the shape of a rat, which he held carefully in a handkerchief between his fingers.  "Portkey," he said unnecessarily, and he checked his watch.  "We've got about a minute."

Now that he was aware that they were being followed, this was the longest sixty seconds Ron had experienced.  James, he realised, wasn't precisely nervous, but he _was_ very alert and watchful, which made the wait a jumpy experience.

Then the portkey activated and they were swept away by it ...

... to land, with a thump, in a small woodland glade next to a building that looked as though it had been plucked out of a book of fairytales and carelessly dropped there. 

James wrapped up the portkey and shoved it back into his pocket.  Then he looked around and whistled a seemingly idle series of notes.  There were four startlingly loud pops and Harry and the others appeared a few feet away.

Harry let out a crow of delight and jumped on Ron.

"There's no time for that," James warned him sharply.  He turned to the others.  "Where is he?"

"Not here," Sirius Black replied dryly.  "Looks like he hasn't been here for a week or so."

"Great!" James said, exasperated.  "Well, in that case we need to move on."

"Were you followed?" Remus Lupin asked.

"Yeah.  I think we lost him at Pottle-on-Sea, but let's not take any chances.  Harry, where's Hedwig?"

Harry peeled himself off Ron's shoulder and put two fingers in his mouth, whistling sharply.  There was a rustle in the trees above them and a Snowy Owl swooped down to land on his outstretched arm.

"Anyone got a bit of parchment?" James asked, and he accepted a scrap of paper and a quill from Peter Pettigrew.  "Thanks."  He rested it on his friend's back as he scratched out a note.

"Where are we?" Ron asked Harry.

"I'll tell you when we've moved on," Harry replied, smiling at him.

"Where are we going?"

Harry's smiled broadened into a grin.  "Tell you when we get there!"

"Great.  Whose place is that?" he asked, gesturing to the little stone tower.

"Tell you that when we get there too."

"Okay ..."

James finished his note, waved it in the air to dry the ink, then rolled it up and sealed it with a tap of his wand.  He put it in a small pouch attached to Hedwig's leg.  "To Bill Weasley, Hedwig.  Don't let anyone else have it!"

She bobbed her head twice and took off.

Ron stared at James.  "Why are you writing to my brother?"

"I'll tell you that when we get where we're going," James said briskly, but not unkindly.

Ron was getting rather fed up of this answer.  He shot Harry a frustrated look, but his friend shrugged.

"There are many difficult questions in our job," Remus said unexpectedly.  "At least you'll be getting answers to yours eventually.  That's not always the case for us."

From their expressions Ron realised this was the best he was going to get for the time being.  He subsided, not entirely gracefully.

"Okay, let's move on," James said to the others.  He looked at Peter.  "Wormtail?"

"I've told Sirius and Remus," the shorter man said.  "They're going to take Harry and Ron.  I'll take you."

"Take my arm," Remus said, coming to stand next to Ron.  "I'm going to side-along Apparate you …"

 

~~~

 

The answers to Ron's many questions were not quick in coming.  They didn't travel together to their destination and it was early evening before he and Remus rejoined the others.  Remus was at least a less annoying travel companion than James, however.  He still talked quite a lot, in a way that Ron now realised was designed to avoid opportunities for yet more questions, but he asked about Ron's recent activities and chatted to him about the general aggravation of working in retail and the more specific aggravation of working for one's relatives - apparently he had experienced both himself in the past.  Ron found it easier to relax around him, although he wasn't sure why, especially as he knew the man was a werewolf.

He opted not to say anything about his adventures at the Pink Kneazle Wizards' Club, though.  He was still a bit sensitive about his forced departure from his job there and he wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to discuss it with anyone but Harry anyway.  Remus appeared to be more sensitive than his friends and didn't push at any of Ron's evasions.

They stopped in a vast Muggle market somewhere to buy a late lunch from a booth - crêpes filled with baked beans and topped with cheese, served in brightly printed cardboard cones with little wooden forks.  As they perched on the edge of a raised planter at the side of the street to eat them, Ron reflected on how horrified his mother would be if she knew; she thought all Muggle food was suspect and eating in the street was a no-no for all her children.  But the crêpes were hot and tasty and he enjoyed watching the activity in the market, which was very different from anything he'd seen in the magical world.  It reminded him a little of the trip the people from the Running Hare Coven had made to Totnes over Yule, although the market here was much bigger.

When they were finished, Remus bought provisions from a couple of the stalls - vegetables, bread, a smoked ham and a few other things - and stowed half of them in his backpack and half in Ron's satchel.  They weren't exactly travelling light; each of them had a broom in a waxed canvas carrying bag slung across his back, Ron had his old school book-bag stuffed with a change of clothing, extra underwear and a wash-kit, and Remus had what looked like all of that in his backpack plus some kind of sleeping bag or bedroll besides.

"Have we got much further to go?" he asked at one point.

"Here and there," Remus replied cryptically. 

Apparently he meant this literally, for they dodged about catching buses and trains in much the same way that James had done that morning.  Alerted to the possibility of being followed, Ron was now on the lookout but didn't see anyone who seemed to be shadowing them.  It was just after four o'clock and the light was going when Remus finally pulled Ron into the doorway of a disused department store and produced another portkey.  Two minutes later they landed on an old farm track bordered by high hedges that led around the side of a hill.  At the other end of the track was a derelict farmhouse.  It had no roof and only three of the external walls were still standing but Sirius and Harry were already there, setting up camp.

 

~~~

 

Peter and James arrived while Harry and Ron were erecting the three Muggle-style two-man tents within the walls of the old farmhouse.  Meanwhile Remus and Sirius had created a small hearth in a sheltered spot and were making dinner.

"Any trouble?" Remus asked.

"None," Peter said.  "You two?"

"Not even a tail.  Makes a nice change."

"Well?" Sirius demanded of James as he handed them mugs of tea.  "What happened?"

James cast a wary look at where Harry and Ron were wrestling with tent-poles and canvas, but neither of them was paying attention or was close enough to overhear.

"Bit of a convoluted story," he said.  "Bill Weasley - remember him from school?  Red-headed firstie, blue eyes, freckles?  Well, he's working for Dumbledore too.  That's not important at the moment.  By pure chance Bill happened to Floo-call his mother one day and she was blowing her cauldron lid because she said his grandmother had abducted young Ron.  Bill thought that sounded a bit odd, so he called Granny Prewett himself to see what was up."

"Lillian Prewett abducted her own grandson?" Remus said, astonished.  "What in Merlin's name - ?"

"That's not the good part," James interrupted.  "Give me a chance, okay?  It turns out that Ron was working for his twin brothers and got into row with them one day, so they sacked him.  He finds a new job, and a week or two later his grandmother has a vision of some kind that scares the daylights out of her.  She goes looking for Ron, gives the manager of the place he's working for a lecture he'll never forget, and takes the lad home with her."

"What are you leaving out?" Sirius asked, puzzled.

The corner of James's mouth puckered a little.  "The name of the place he was working for," he said, and he took a cautious sip of his tea.

Sirius began to grin.  "Go on then."

"The Pink Kneazle Wizards' Club."

Sirius inhaled a mouthful of tea and began to choke.  Remus thumped his back, trying not to laugh.

"What was he doing there?" Peter demanded.  "Isn't that illegal for a lad his age?"

"He wasn't stripping.  He was doing routine maintenance work for them, although what exactly a place like that calls 'routine maintenance' I wouldn't like to guess."  James began to grin himself.  "Granny was _livid_ when she told me, all ruffled feathers and outraged dignity that one of her favourite chicks was working in a place of ill repute."

"I get that she wouldn't like it," Remus said, "but if he wasn't - er - servicing the clients, then what exactly was the problem?  Surely she wouldn't have a vision about that?"

"Well, she didn't," James said, and his grin faded into an irritated frown.  "That's the annoying part.  She wouldn't tell me what the vision was about, all she would say was that if the lad had stayed there another day he would have got himself into very serious trouble, because he was about to make a bad decision."

"Marvellous."

"Reckon he'll tell us about it?" Sirius asked, when he'd recovered from his coughing fit.

"You're a funny man, Padfoot," James retorted.  "I'm not going to be the one to ask him, that's for sure.  Anyway ... Bill contacted Dumbledore about him and Dumbledore contacted us.  End of story."

"For the time being at least," Peter said.  "Did the old lady say anything about his birthmark?"

"A little.  She wasn't keen to say much, but I get the impression that's more out of habit than anything else."  James took a swallow of his tea.  "She said the symbol is definitely a phoenix and it's a symbol air and fire power."  The corner of his mouth twitched again.  "She was itching to know all about Harry - we had a bit of a stand-off about that."  He shrugged.  "What goes around comes around.  She wasn't prepared to give me much about Ron, so I didn't see why I should tell her about Harry.  She's the seer, let her find it out for herself."

"Good answer," Peter approved.  "She of all people should realise we can't tell just anyone these things."

"Seems like the row with old Trelawney put the wind up her, though," James said.  "She lives like a recluse these days."

"Cassandra Trelawney may have been a gifted seer, but if you read between the lines of what Dumbledore says, she was a gigantic pain the backside as a person," Sirius remarked.  "The fight was supposed to be epic."

"Well, let's leave it for now," Remus said quickly, seeing Ron and Harry approaching.  "How are you two getting on with the tents?

"They're up," Harry said, looking exasperated.  "Anyone's guess if they'll _stay_ up, but Ron knows a couple of new anchoring charms so they might be okay."

If the four men wondered what Ron had been doing to learn anchoring charms, they wisely managed to keep the thought to themselves.

Supper was bread and soup, the latter made from a packet of dried vegetables and noodles but flavoured with chunks of the smoked ham Remus had bought.  Sirius had erected some Aversion Charms to block the wind and divert attention from them, so they all sat on their empty packs as close to the fire as they dared while they ate.  It wasn't particularly warm but it was quiet enough to talk comfortably.  When they were all done, the few scraps were brushed into the fire and Peter ran a quick _Scourgify!_ over the dishes.

"Right," James said quietly, "we all need to get some sleep, so let's make this quick."  He pointed to Ron.  "You must have about a hundred questions, so I'm going to be as upfront with you as I can.  You've got to understand that we can't answer everything straightaway.  There's no time right now, it's too much information, and in any case some of it you need to hear from someone else.  I can tell you some of it though.  So - ask your questions but if I say I can't tell you, it's not because I'm trying to hide anything, okay?"  Looking a bit surprised at this, Ron nodded.  "Good.  Ask."

"Where are we?"

"No idea.  Pete?"

"It's not really important," Peter replied.  "We're safe here for the night and in the morning we'll be moving on."

"Why do you need to be safe?" Ron asked at once.

"Because there are people in powerful positions who want to know where we are and what we're doing," Remus said.  "They think they know what we're doing and they'd like to stop it."

"So what _are_ you doing?"

"That's possibly the most complicated question you could ask," Sirius remarked, amused.

"Give it a shot," Remus said more peaceably.

"What do you know about the last war?" James asked Ron.

Ron's expression became interestingly smooth and uncommunicative at this question.  "Not much, just some stuff Dad's said about Death Eaters.  They're all in Azkaban now, aren't they?"

The four men exchanged sour smiles, and even Harry looked rather chagrined.

"If only!" Sirius said shortly.

"Hopefully most of them are," James said more diplomatically, "but let's just say that there are a few people we know were Death Eaters who got away with it.  People who would probably surprise you if I told you who they are.  But never mind that.  Did your father tell you anything about their leader?"

Ron shook his head.  "No … I just assumed he got locked up with the rest.  No one ever talks about it much.  I got the impression that it sort of … happened really quickly and the Aurors dealt with it."

"Funny how many people would rather believe that," Peter commented.

"Well, the truth is a bit different to what the majority of witches and wizards would tell you," James told Ron, "and no harm to your father, but he's either fooling himself or he just doesn't want you to know the truth.  I expect it's the latter.  He's a Ministry man, isn't he?  He has to know a fair bit more than the general populace do.  Anyway, never mind that.  The Death Eaters were around for a lot longer than you think, they were already making trouble when we were all at school - "

"And that was just their political wing," Sirius interjected.  There was no humour in his eyes as he said it.

"Agreed.  The party politics were dirty, but that was nothing compared to what they were doing underground to try to sway public opinion."

"The Death Eaters were terrorists," Harry said to Ron.  "That's what my Muggle granddad calls them, and I reckon it's about right.  They'd torture and kill people - mostly Muggleborns and their families - to scare everyone else into doing what they wanted."

"That's the plain man's name for them," Peter added.  He fished in his pocket as he spoke and pulled out the little bag holding his casting bones, busying himself undoing the knot at the neck of it.  "If you want the fancy term the Aurors use, they were pureblood supremacists.  Still are, some of them." 

"Which isn't to say that their leader was necessarily of the same viewpoint - opinions vary on that - but he certainly made use of their prejudices to angle for their support and get what he wanted," Remus continued.

"So who is he?" Ron asked.

"We don't say his name in open air," James said at once, giving him a warning look.  "It should be safe - it probably _is_ safe - but at one time his name was jinxed, and given the work we do we don't take the risk.  It's safe enough within warded walls, but we _never_ say it where the wind could carry it to the wrong quarters."

"We employ the euphemisms the rest of the populace used during the war," Sirius said, curling his lip, "we call him _You Know Who_ or _He Who Must Not Be Named_."

"Okay."  Ron hugged his knees, thinking about this for a moment or two.  "So what do you do that's so secret?"

James relaxed just a little inside.  He didn't want to linger on the subject of the Death Eaters' leader for now.  "One of the things the Death Eaters did while they were gaining power was to use the channels of magic that crisscross the land," he explained, "what the Muggles sometimes call 'ley-lines'.  Basically, from what we know of them they distribute magic evenly across the world, preventing a dangerous build up."  He hesitated.  "This is my particular field of study.  I'm not sure how to explain it to someone who has no background in the field, but … you know that the planet is surrounded by different sorts of energy fields, yes?  One of the strongest ones is magnetism."

"Yeah … yeah, I heard that."

"Well, there are also several magical fields.  The biggest one runs through the air, but it's also the weakest.  There's another in the water, which means that all water - even land-locked seas and oases in a desert and droplets in the air and the water trapped in the cells of your body - _all_ that water is connected together by the magic in it.  And then there's the magical field in the earth, which is the strongest form of magic there is.

"Then you've got things like the ley-lines, and this is where a lot of what we think we know is really just very plausible theories.  For one thing, although we _know_ that the ley-lines exist and can be … influenced … we're not sure exactly what the extent of them is and what the full extent of their purpose is.  We're pretty sure they form a proper network that's possibly in some sort of pattern, but we can't always follow them and so far no one has ever succeeded in creating a proper map of them.  We can only map small sections."

James grew more animated as he talked.  "There are so many possibilities, so many areas to study.  My father studied ley-lines for most of his life and he was convinced that the network extends far beyond the ley-lines that run through the ground.  He had a theory that there were more lines, finer and less powerful, less easily detected, that flowed through water and air, and that all of these lines linked together - "

"Ease up, Prongs," Remus said, amused.  "That's a lot of information to dump on the lad in one sitting, and not what he asked either."

"But it's interesting!" Ron blurted out, and both James and Harry beamed at him.

"And we all need to sleep tonight," Sirius warned, although the corner of his mouth was twitching too.  "Advanced Geomagical Theory can wait for another time, James - cut to the chase!"

"Er, yes, of course," James said, a little abashed.  "All right … ley-lines.  So basically the Death Eaters messed with the ley-lines - we'll talk about what they did and why some other time - and afterwards we discovered that in the places where they'd been the local magic was …"

"Polluted," Peter supplied quietly, although he didn't look up from the patterns he was casting with the stones in the light of the fire.

"Thank you, yes - polluted.  Dark magic taints everything it touches, of course, but this was different because the ley-lines were either no longer functioning properly or they were carrying the tainted magic across the land and polluting other places too."

"So basically what we do is find the polluted spots and cleanse them," Remus put in.  "That's a very truncated explanation, but essentially it."

Ron frowned.  "Why do you have to do it in secret?  Why would anyone have a problem with that?"

"Because, as James explained, the whole science of ley-lines is theoretical at best," Sirius said.  "It used to be just one of hundreds of fields of study conducted by the Department of Mysteries, and because it was labelled a 'magical theory' the last couple of unimaginative Ministers and their administrations decided the tainting of the ley-lines couldn't be proven and therefore was not a risk to the general populace.  In other words, they didn't believe it and wouldn't waste money putting it right.  And that's only half the story.  There are other repercussions of the war, such as the Death Eaters who got away, that should have been looked into and weren't.  Everyone focussed on the ones who were caught - particularly You Know Who himself - and stopped caring about all the little loose ends.  Only some of them weren't little or even particularly loose."

"The Department of Mysteries was always a bit controversial in the eyes of the public," Peter said quietly.  "That's mostly because very few people knew exactly what work was done there, and those who did were bound never to speak of it.  But at the end of the war, during the fight to contain He Who Must Not Be Named, the Department - the physical department within the Ministry building - was the centre of the action and in the process it was significantly damaged."

"Most people will tell you it was blown up,"  Remus said.  "That's not true.  But in the process of containing You Know Who, the structure became unsafe and the decision was taken to seal it up.  No one has been inside since, despite repeated attempts by … people in various high places … to persuade the Minister to authorise a properly qualified team to go in and assess the damage.  The last Minister, Millicent Bagnold, was a bit more sensible - she refused to let anyone in directly after it was sealed, but agreed to reassess the position after a couple of years.  But in the meantime she fell ill and had to step down, and we got the current buffoon, Cornelius Fudge, who refuses point blank to allow anything or anyone to touch it.  In fact, he went further - he said that the Department had always been a huge drain on the Ministry's finances - "

"It wasn't," James said.  "It was largely funded by outside investors."

" - with very few if any visible returns for the taxpayer and that under the circumstances it was no longer needed and should be shut down."

"Thus killing off literally hundreds of years' worth of valuable studies into the very nature of magic and the magical race," Peter concluded, "not to mention dishonouring the memory of the dozens of Unspeakables and Aurors who lost their lives during the confrontation with He Who Must Not Be Named.  Their bodies were never recovered and their families were never given so much as a sliver of an explanation for their disappearance - in fact, in most cases the families were refused the basic financial assistance and pensions they were entitled to on the grounds that there was no evidence that they were actually dead."

"Which is a disgrace to put it mildly," Sirius said curtly, "when you consider that several people I could name were given widows' pensions despite their dearly beloveds being known Death Eaters."

There was a long silence.  Then Ron gave James a speculative look. 

"So how did you come to be doing this clean-up work, then?"

James looked up at him and his mouth went awry for a moment.  Dealing with this boy was going to be a challenge.  "Son," he said kindly, "shouldn't that be obvious?"

Harry shot his father an irritated glance and turned to his friend.  "They were the only Unspeakables who got out of the Department after You Know Who was dealt with," he explained.  "Them and my mum and a couple of other people."

Ron considered this.  "And what happened to him?" he asked.

"That's something I don't want to talk about here," James said.  "But you will need to know about it, so I promise you that you'll be told soon.  All right?"

 

~~~

 

Ron and Harry shared a tent that night. 

Ron hadn't come equipped with a bedroll, but a quick engorgement charm enlarged Harry's bedding enough for the two of them, so they spread the groundsheet, laid out a double layer of blankets on top of it and climbed under Harry's thick, unzipped sleeping bag.  A discreet warming charm on the tent ensured they were comfortable; a silencing charm made sure they could talk without an audience.

"All the same, we need to be a bit careful about how much magic we use while we're out in the open," Harry said.  "We put up wards just before you and Remus arrived, but since this is a temporary camp they're pretty low-key."

"Why are you camping anyway?" Ron wanted to know.  "It's a bit bloody wet and chilly at this time of year!"

"We weren't supposed to be camping out at all tonight," Harry explained, as he kneaded his pillow - actually a t-shirt stuffed with other clothing - into a better shape.  "And not like this - usually we use wizard tents if we have to camp, but you saw what happened when we got to the Folly.  He wasn't there like he was supposed to be.  So tonight we're roughing it."

" _Who_ was supposed to be there though?"

"Dumbledore," Harry said simply.  He pushed the pillow into place and flopped out on it next to Ron.  "Look, don't think about it too much for now.  Dad wasn't pulling a fast one, you know - he means it, as soon as we get a chance we'll tell you everything.  Today didn't go as planned, that's all."

"Hm."  Ron tried to settle himself.  He wasn't cold, but there was no denying that this was far from the most comfortable of beds, although they'd made sure there was nothing sharp or knobbly on the ground before they laid the groundsheet.

"What have you been doing since Yule anyway?" Harry asked.  "I thought you might have written to me at the coven.  They would have passed it on to Mum and she would have sent it to me, you know."

That hadn't occurred to Ron.  "Didn't seem to be much point," he muttered.  "Not like there was a lot to tell."  Except being sacked by the twins, hired by a sex club and abducted by his loopy old grandmother to clip her hedges.  But right now he didn't want to talk about all that, even to Harry.  He was tired, anxious and bewildered to discover that for the first time in a long while he was close to Harry and didn't want to grab him.  All he really wanted to do was tuck himself into the warmth of his friend's body and sleep.

"Are you okay?" Harry asked him quietly.  "You're not … angry with me or anything, are you?"

Ron blinked.  "Why would I be angry with you?"

"For not being around and not coming to get you sooner, maybe."

"Well, I'm not.  I'm just … really tired."  He made an extra effort.  "Some funny stuff did happen, I s'pose, but I'd just rather tell you later, okay?  When I'm not knackered."

"Okay."

Harry settled himself on his side under the sleeping bag and Ron wriggled until he was pressed against his back.  He breathed in Harry's familiar smell of strange herbs, sweat and male musk with relief and let his eyes drift shut.

"I'm glad you're here," Harry said in a very subdued tone just as he was on the cusp of sleep.

"Me too," Ron mumbled.  "Missed you."

Some of the tension went out of Harry's shoulders.  "Missed you too."

 **End Part 1**


	2. Chapter 2

**Part 2**

Ron regretted the missed opportunity for sex the following morning.  He could have fancied it when he woke up, but Harry was awake ahead of him and gone; he could hear his voice outside, quietly talking to his father.  So Ron reluctantly told his morning erection to take a hike and dragged himself out of the tangle of blankets and sleeping bag.  The cold air outside the tent finished off any amatory urges, leaving him only with a strong desire for a piss instead.

Camping the Muggle way took all the fun out of things, he thought grouchily, as he took care of business outside the walls of the derelict building.  He was stiff from lying on a hard surface all night and the wind was cold.

When he returned Harry was waiting for him.  He was holding what looked like a tiny green canvas basket with a rope handle which he enlarged with a tap of his wand until it was the size of a small bucket.

"What's that?" Ron asked.

"Collapsible bucket," Harry explained.  "Got it from Granddad Evans.  It's made of some nylon stuff - see the rings around it?  They hold it open.  When you're finished, you just flatten it.  Of course, it's handy to make it smaller too but you need magic for that."  He grinned at Ron, then set the bucket down and swirled his wand inside it until it filled with water.  Another tap and the water steamed.  "Thought you might like a wash and a shave."

"Thanks, mate."  Ron found his wash-kit and cleaned up, grateful for his self-foaming razor and face cloth.

While he was shaving Harry made tea and Sirius, Peter and Remus slowly emerged from their tents.  James, however, was crouching a little way away from everyone else and holding something in his hands that he kept tilting as though to catch the light.  Ron thought he saw his lips moving as he stared intently at the object; a brief flash of light suggested it was a mirror.  By the time he was finished and dressed, and had refilled the bucket and turned it over to Sirius so that he and Remus could wash and shave, James had finished whatever he was doing and put the mirror away.

Breakfast was thick slices of bread toasted over a small fire and a couple of oranges cut into chunks and passed around.

"We'll see if we can get something a bit better on the way," James said.

"Do we know where we're going then?" Sirius asked.

"There's a coven within walking distance," James replied.  "He wants us to go there and wait for word from Lily."

"Which coven?" Harry asked surprised.

"The White Mare Coven?  I've never heard of them before, but he seems to think they'll be glad of a visit from us."

"There's something needs fixing there then," Remus concluded.

Peter was already spreading out his casting bones and peering at them, perplexed.  "I'm not getting much from the ley-lines hereabouts at all," he said, casting the bones a second time.  "They're all weaker ones and seem to be fairly clean."

"Well, when I said 'walking distance' I meant that we'd probably get there before it gets properly dark," James said.

Peter gave him a _look_ and scooped the bones up, dropping them back into their little bag.  "An all-day walk.  How nice!  Especially since it looks like it might rain later on."

"If it does, we'll saddle up and fly," James said in a conciliatory tone, "but we really daren't do that unless it comes in foggy - "

"Fog'll be the least of it."

James sighed.  "Until then, let's get packed up and get walking."

Ron went to help Harry pack up his bedroll and collapse the tent.  Being a Muggle article it was bulky and a nuisance to pack away, especially as it had been damp in the night and the canvas was reluctant to dry out even with the help of charms.  But once it was rolled into its canvas bag the whole parcel shrank reasonably well and he strapped it to the bottom of his backpack.  Harry stowed the bedroll the same way and they loaded themselves up.

"You know, if we follow the road we might be able to pick up a local bus for part of the way," Remus suggested, as Sirius put out the fire and cleaned up the evidence of it with a spell or two.  "A rural bus is surely less likely to be monitored, especially as we weren't expecting to be heading out of here on foot today."

"We'll see," James said neutrally.  He laid his wand on the flat of his palm.  "Point me."  The wand spun until it pointed roughly south west.  "Okay, that's our heading.  Let's go."

It was a long, damp and muddy day.  In the end Remus's suggestion of catching a local bus proved useful, but only for a very short stretch of their journey.  The rest of the time they walked the lesser used public footways, country lanes and footpaths.  The latter in particular were overgrown, wet and slippery.

Ron would have liked to question how they could set off for a place that they knew nothing about and didn't know the specific location of, but none of the others seemed to find this odd and simply followed James's lead as he regularly made use of the Four Points Spell to keep them on track.  It seemed better not to ask questions for the time being, so he concentrated on keeping up and answering Harry's questions instead.

"Are you going to tell me what you've been doing since Yule?" he asked, as they all walked along a lengthy footpath that ran alongside a duel carriageway. 

"If you tell me what you've been doing," Ron replied.

"You already know, mostly," Harry said.  "Find a polluted ley-line, set up wards, clean the ley-line, move on."   He was slightly ahead of Ron on the path; he glanced back with a raised brow. "You?

"Got sacked, got a new job, got sacked again," Ron said shortly.

"The twins sacked you?  Why?"

Ron managed a hard smile at this.  "One of their mates pissed me off and I told him to stick a broom up his arse and ride it," he said.

Harry grinned at him.  "About bloody time, if you ask me.  I heard what Jordan said to you the last time I went into the shop.  I'd have told him to suck off a firework personally."

"I was saving that for the next time, but I didn't get a chance."

"So then what happened?"

"Got another job."  Ron wondered how much of their conversation the other men could hear.  They were ahead of him and Harry and the passing traffic was quite loud, but that meant the two of them had to speak up in any case to hear each other.  He wasn't sure he wanted the others to overhear.

"Doing what?" Harry asked.  The pathway widened a little and he was able to drop back until they were level and could talk more normally.

"Doing maintenance mostly."  Ron wondered why he was so reluctant to talk to Harry about his experiences of the past couple of months.  It was stupid; Harry of all people would see the humour in them.

"Better than helping the twins keep shop?"  Harry showed no signs of impatience; he hitched his backpack into a more comfortable position and offered Ron his water flask.

"Just about anything would be better than that."  Ron took a swig from the bottle, wiped the lip and handed it back, deciding he should just come out with it.  "I was fixing stuff for the Pink Kneazle Club."

Harry's head whipped around and his eyes were huge with surprise.  A delighted grin lit up his face.  "You're kidding me!"

Ron grinned back reluctantly.  "Honest.  I wasn't even going to apply, but nowhere else would take me on, so I thought I didn't have much to lose.  I didn't have anything to do with the customers," he added quickly.  "I was just fixing their stuff that got broken."

"Merlin!  So what's it like inside?"

Ron wrinkled his nose.  "A bit tacky, to be honest, but it's only open after dark so it looks a bit different with the wonky lighting they've got set up."  Having got over the hurdle of admitting he'd worked there, he now found it easier to talk.  "It's not what I expected.  I mean, it's ... they've got normal stuff, like a bar and dance area, you know?  But there's a kind of theatre and loads of, um, themed rooms."

"Themed?"  Harry was agog.  "What, like kinky stuff?  It's a sex club, yeah, with prostitutes and stuff like that?"

Ron shook his head.  "Not a sex club.  Legally it's a club 'licensed for the provision of adult entertainment'.  No actual sex between the staff and clients allowed, but just about anything else goes.  Most of 'em seem to go there to get tied up and whipped or watch other people getting off."  A spark of his usual humour flared up.  "The dungeon's pretty popular, and they have theme nights where some of the hosts get dressed up and, um, put on a show in the theatre.  I saw bits and pieces of some of it, but to be honest it was a bit off-putting."

"How so?"

"Well - oof!"  Ron's attention was so completely on Harry that he walked straight into Sirius.

"Sorry," Sirius said earnestly, "but I've got to ask.  I had to go to the Pink Kneazle when my old man died, to cancel his membership.  I thought the place was men only?"

Ron blinked.  The others had all stopped in the middle of the pavement and were regarding him with varying degrees of interest.

"Er ... yeah, it is," he said warily.

"Well, there was a bird there when I went in.  About yea tall, far eastern looking - "  Sirius made a vague cupping gesture in front of his chest, " - tits, the lot.  Not much in the way of clothes."

"That's Fuchsia," Ron explained.  "He's a bloke, the tits are fake.  He says he got them because most of his customers like to fool themselves that he's a girl."

Remus whistled, Harry laughed and James rolled his eyes; Peter looked only vaguely interested.  Sirius blinked and began to grin.

"Kidding me," he said, and Ron sighed.

"I wish," he said.  "He's a nympho and his boyfriend's short of a few brain cells.  I spent half my time trying to keep out of their way, but Fuchsia was always breaking stuff and trying to drag me into a cupboard to 'fix' it for him.  Nightmare."

"And what's his boyfriend like?" Remus wanted to know.

"Keep moving, people," James warned, and they all started walking again.

"He's big, blond and stupid," Ron said.  A brief memory of the man clad in a grasshopper costume swam into his mind.  "Dunno what any of their real names are, but his professional name's Achilles.  Him and Fuchsia put on a lot of shows for the clients - fancy dress and dead kinky."

"And there's a dungeon?"

"Yeah.  That's mostly Horus's place - "

"Horus?"

"Horus does hardcore bondage.  Fuchsia and Achilles do soft restraints and fantasy scenarios, and Triton does water games," Ron explained.

The stories of his adventures at the Pink Kneazle Club (although somewhat edited) kept them all going until they stopped for a late lunch, buying pasties and cake from a farm shop which they washed down with handmade cider.  Until that point the weather had been cold and damp but bearable, but within an hour of leaving the farm the skies clouded up and a thick drizzle set in.

"I think we can risk flying from here," James said, when they stopped in a small copse to discuss their options.  "But we're going to have to fly high enough to be obscured by the cloud and steer clear of main roads.  Pete, I'll take you up behind me if you prefer.  Ron, stick close to one or other of us.  If anyone gets separated, keep going south west and head for the nearest wizard community."

As instructions went this was not very reassuring to Ron, but he took his broom out of its bag without comment.  They mounted up and kicked off, taking a cautious route out of the copse then steering upwards at a sharp vector.  Ron tailed Harry closely, not wanting to lose him in the icy cloud.

Ron had played Quidditch in some pretty adverse conditions, including through a heavy snow storm, but this was still a miserable experience.  The cold moisture of the cloud quickly soaked through the old waxed canvas of his cloak and his hands grew numb on the handle of his broomstick; forward visibility became poor as the evening began to close in early because of the bad weather.  He concentrated on keeping the tail-twigs of Harry's broom in sight, for his own broom wasn't fitted with a compass and he knew he'd be in trouble if he lost sight of him.

Then abruptly Harry swerved and dropped back to fly level with him.  He too was soaked - Ron could see his dark hair running with moisture under his hood, his glasses were almost opaque with raindrops, and he was pale with the cold.

"What's up?" he demanded, raising his voice to bridge the gap between them.

"I lost the others in the cloud about ten minutes ago," Harry called back.  "I've been following the heading Dad set, but we're on our own.  I think we should look for somewhere to set down before it gets properly dark."

Ron felt a twinge of anxiety.  "Do you know where we are?"

Harry shook his head.  "I reckon we're somewhere in Gloucester, but that's a wild guess to be honest.  But if we land, I can use the ley-lines to feel out the nearest wizard community and if we can get to it we should be able to find a Floo point."

"And where do we Floo to?"

"I'm open to suggestions.  But we can't keep flying through this once it gets dark."

"Okay, let's head down then."

This too was unnerving, but he followed Harry's lead again and presently they alighted in a small field.  It wasn't quite so cold on the ground, but the rain was much more noticeable and the heavy mists shrouding everything made visibility poor.  Harry handed Ron his broom to hold while he crouched down, running his bare hands through the straggling grass and weeds for a few minutes.  When he eventually stood up again, shaking a small slug from his left sleeve, he looked relieved.

"There's a magical community just over a mile from here, I reckon," he said.  "The signature's strong enough that it might even be that commune Dad was talking about, but whichever it is, we should be okay there.  Let's put the brooms away just in case, though, this is definitely bordering onto Muggle farmland and we don't want to run into any of _them_ with brooms and stuff on show."

Ron dug the bag out of his backpack and began to run a couple of basic drying spells over the broom itself; they wouldn't be very effective in these conditions, but it was better than putting a cold and completely soaked broom back into the bag.

"What do we say if it's _not_ the commune and the people want to know what we were doing out in this weather?" he asked.

"Tell 'em we wanted to try Muggle-style camping and got caught out?" Harry suggested.

"All right."

They started walking, Ron following Harry's lead again.  This time they deliberately followed the small tarmacced lane that ran alongside the field; the poor light and rotten conditions made it too risky to try walking through the fields.  Fortunately they didn't encounter any Muggle vehicles, or indeed anyone else at all.  The rain was picking up now and Ron could feel the cold water seeping through his clothes and running down his back.  Worse was the clinging weight of his saturated jeans and his boots were full of the water that ran down his legs out of the heavy denim.  He could have shouted with relief when Harry finally grabbed his hand and pointed to a heavy boulder half hidden in the hedge on the opposite side of the road. 

On first glance it was just a large chunk of stone but when Harry went up to it, it seemed to flicker and shift into something else; a properly carved stone with a single image on it.  Ron squinted and finally lit his wand so they could see it better.  The image was of the head and torso of a man in profile, with antlers on his head and a drawn bow in his hands, and it was surrounded by a ring of oak leaves.

"It's a coven," Harry said, and he sounded as relieved as Ron felt.  "Funny, I thought Dad said they were called the White Mare Coven?  Horses are a goddess cult, but these people obviously follow Herne."

"Does it matter?" Ron asked.  He felt he could be forgiven for little impatience under the circumstances.

"I don't think so."  Harry reached out and touched the stone, and a small section of the hedge a few feet away suddenly melted away to reveal a gate.  "Come on, they probably know we're here already.  Let's go and introduce ourselves."

What had looked like another empty field surrounded by a hedge turned out to be a neatly managed orchard when they walked through the gate.  A gravel path edged with light-coloured stones led a winding route through the dripping trees, but when Ron would have started walking along it Harry held him back.

"Wait a minute - there should be a shrine here somewhere, or a Grove God.  We should greet that first, they'll know if we don't."

Ron's impatience began to grow, but he trusted Harry's knowledge of these things and held onto his temper as his friend looked about him.  At length he located a stone fixture the size and shape of a small beehive set just off the path and Ron could see that it was a purpose-built thing designed to hold and give shelter to a cast bronze image of a man with antlers.  He was vaguely reminded of the Pan-like figure of the Grove God in the grounds of the Running Hare Coven but this figure was different, with a man's body rather than goat legs, wearing a loincloth and carrying a bow.  He was also surrounded by small offerings - clay images, pieces of carved bone and antler, and small pentacles woven out of twigs.

"There's a lot of offerings for this time of year," Harry remarked, sounding puzzled.  "Especially for a coven this far out of the way, they can't have _that_ many visitors.  Do you have anything we can give Him?  An apple would do, but I ate mine on the way."

"I've got a bit of chocolate left, I think."

"That'd probably encourage rats - better not.  Well maybe it's better this way, seeing as I'm the son of the King Stag."  Harry rummaged in his pockets and pulled out a penknife.  "Hold my broom a sec ..." 

Ron watched as he unfolded the shortest blade and nicked the little finger of his left hand.  A small bead of blood welled up and Harry reached out to smear it on the tip of the god's arrow.

"Hail, Herne," he said softly.  "Blood has been spilled in your honour.  We come among you and yours in peace and bring only goodwill to your house."

He sucked the abused fingertip for a moment, then took his broom back. 

"Should I?" Ron asked warily.

"Wouldn't hurt."  Harry offered him the penknife and Ron awkwardly stabbed his little finger until it bled enough to anoint the arrow-tip.

"Hail, Herne."

"Okay, let's get out of this rain," Harry said, and Ron gratefully followed him up the path at a trot. 

The path wound around the trees quite a lot, but eventually they came to a house in a small clearing at the centre of the orchard.  Ron could see at once that although it looked old in style, it had clearly been designed to look that way rather than being genuinely old.  Nevertheless, it was a pleasant-looking building built of dark yellowish bricks with a low, traditionally tiled roof and chimneys, deep casement windows, an offset front entrance with a deep, tiled porchway, and rose trellises set on the walls between the windows.  The most welcome aspects for Ron, however, were the lights in the windows and someone standing inside the porch holding a lamp and clearly looking out for them.

He was a tall man in early middle age, with shoulder-length dark hair threaded with grey and a short beard.  "You chose a fine evening to be visiting, lads," he said kindly, as he ushered them into the porch.  "Come along in, you're just in time for supper."

 

~~~

 

Harry wasn't entirely surprised to discover that this was not, in fact, the White Mare Coven at all; they called themselves the Green Lord Coven and they were a relatively new group formed from a handful of people who had chosen to split from their mother house, the Green Lady Coven, some five years previously. 

"It was an amicable split," the man who had greeted them, Gwyn ap Allain, assured them, "but we have different aims to them and when the opportunity arose to set up our own hearth, we did so."

This probably didn't mean much to Ron, but Harry nodded - it was something that he'd heard a little about through the network of alternative lifestyle wizards and witches that was such a big part of his life. 

Further conversation revealed that there were eleven residents in the house, only four of whom were currently at home, which was an unusually small number for any coven - the fewest usually considered necessary for a house celebration of the sabbats and esbats was thirteen - and there was a slight imbalance of male and female members.  This wouldn't normally be considered an issue, as there were significantly more female than male practising wiccans in wizarding Britain in any case, but the Green Lord Coven tilted slightly towards male membership, with six male residents to five women.  There were also no members younger than sixteen and while there were three couples in the house, one of them was all female and three of the unpaired men were gay.

Sitting around the table that evening were Gwyn himself, the leader of the coven and high priest; his life-partner Nancy, a woman in her early thirties who was willow thin and had long, pale blonde hair; Rowen, a man in his late twenties with long dark hair in a tail and runic tattoos on his neck; and Joe, who was barely out of his teens and had short, spiked blond hair.  Harry greeted Joe with open pleasure, recognising him as a former Hufflepuff housemate.

They were an open, friendly group, only too happy to welcome visitors and make them at home.  Within moments of being ushered through the door Harry and Ron had been relieved of their packs, brooms and cloaks and - when the extent of their drenching became clear - stripped of their clothes too before the fire in the entrance hall hearth, given warm towels to dry off with and loaned kaftan-shaped flannel robes to wear until their own clothes were dried out.  A hearty supper of bread, cheese and a tasty vegetable stew made up for an otherwise uncomfortable day, and the meal was a leisurely one as Harry introduced himself and Ron and explained a little of their circumstances.

"We were supposed to be going to the White Mare Coven," he explained, as Nancy passed a tall jug of cider around the table.  "I don't know them - how far off course did we fly?"

"They're not known to me," Gwyn said, shaking his head, and there was a murmur of agreement from the others.  "You could be a long way off, though.  We're but half a mile from the north Somerset border."

Harry accepted this philosophically.  He hadn't mentioned that they had been travelling with his father and uncles, and Ron had followed his lead in this by not offering any unnecessary information.  It was better to be careful, despite the unlikelihood of any of these people being connected with the Ministry.  In fact, if anything they were the exact opposite.

"You're part of a coven yourself?" Nancy asked.  "I can tell you're familiar with our ways."

"Yeah, I am," Harry said.  "I was born in the Running Hare Coven in Devon - my mum is one of the priestesses."

"And you?" Rowen asked Ron.

"No - no, my family don't have anything to do with covens," Ron said cautiously.  "I've spent some time with Harry's people though."

"One of our aims is to reach out to people who don't have a traditional connection to the covens," Gwyn told them, "people who might be interested in an alternative to the mainstream wizarding culture promoted by the Ministry, but who might for any number of reasons not find themselves a comfortable fit into the more common coven lifestyle.  Muggleborns and halfbloods, for example, the more nomadic wiccans, and people - perhaps like yourselves - who aren't by nature an easy fit into the goddess cycle of birth and regeneration."

"I noticed you don't have any children here," Harry said, interested.  "That's really unusual."

They were nodding agreement.  "No harm to them for that," Rowen said, "but not everyone wants to have children and not everyone _can_ have children."

"Gwyn and I haven't been able to have children ourselves," Nancy said with calm dignity, "and we've accepted that, but we did find some … pressure … from the other families at Green Lady to keep trying, even though we'd made our decision to move on in our lives.  They didn't mean any harm, but it became quite stressful to be continually pushed to try this ritual and that potion all the time."

"And there was never any problem with me being gay," Joe said, "but I didn't feel like I fitted in and to be honest I didn't really _want_ to fit in there.  If I'd wanted to be surrounded by toddlers, I could have gone to live with my dad and stepmother!"  He grinned and winked at them, taking any sting out of the statement.

"The youngest member of our house is Lucy, and she's a year away from finishing at Hogwarts," Gwyn continued.  "She came here with her mother Sarah, who's a travelling musician, and besides the two of them there's Sarah's partner Lewis - who travels with her - Sean, who lectures on traditional wizard woodcrafts, Matthew, who's currently tending to some family business in Kent, and Hermione and Susan who are both furthering their education through distance learning.  It's an understood thing that while we don't mind children visiting, those who come to live here bring no family younger than fifteen and have no plans to have a family.  And we especially welcome those, like Joe here, who have a preference for their own sex and might prefer a coven with a less traditional emphasis.  That's why we honour Herne, who is first and foremost the Lord of the hunt."

"How do you plan to keep the hearth running in the future though?  Sorry," Harry added quickly.  "I'm not being negative, honest, it's just that every other coven I've visited raises the kids in the tradition and most people have family connections to the house going back generations."

"You don't though," Ron pointed out quietly, before anyone else could comment.

"Yeah, but I think Mum's the only member of Running Hare who's completely Muggleborn," Harry said.  "And I was born and raised in the tradition, the same as the others.  The number of people coming in from the outside is pretty small."

"But we aren't following the tradition you were raised in," Nancy pointed out, smiling a little.

"The intention was - is - to encourage younger people who might otherwise leave a traditional coven to come to us," Gwyn added.  "Hopefully there would be enough newcomers over time to keep the hearth running, and perhaps there would also be people who would come to us initially as a gentle introduction to the life before finding another coven to commit to."

"Except that we're not sure if we can continue here," Rowen said, and there was a grim note in his voice.

"Why not?" Ron asked, surprised.  "It sounds like a great idea to me!"

This brought some smiles from their hosts, but Gwyn moved his goblet on the table restlessly.

"You'll have noticed that we border lands with some Muggle farms," he said, "and there's a village perhaps four miles from here."

"You're well hidden from them," Harry said, but there was a question in his voice as he said it.

"We are now," Joe said.

"Until recently, we didn't ward as strongly as some of the covens do," Gwyn continued.  "The purpose was for Muggleborns and halfbloods to find us easily, not put them off by heavy warding, and we thought lighter wards would be sufficient.  But last summer we had a dispute with one of our neighbours over a boundary fence - "

"To be fair, he wasn't the real problem," Nancy put in.  "The matter was settled easily enough, but one of his farmhands made some threatening noises when it first happened and he and his friends ... well ..."

"We're not sure how they managed to get through the wards anyway," Rowen said.  "One of them must have had a touch of magic; not enough to warrant a letter from Hogwarts, but enough that the lighter wards weren't enough to conceal us from him.  They broke into the north meadow where the Master Oak is."

There was a pause, and Ron glanced at Harry.  "Is that - ?"

Harry silenced him with a touch and looked around at the others.  "You have a holy oak here?"

"That's why we chose this land," Gwyn said.  "The orchard was here already and we built the house ourselves on the spot where another house had been.  But it was the oak that drew us to this spot - the first year we were here the mistletoe was just establishing itself, but the Yule before last it had as heavy a crop as you could ever wish to see."

"We didn't realise they'd done anything at first," Rowen said, and his voice was taut with suppressed anger.  "Then Lucy and Joe went up to the meadow one afternoon and found most of the offerings that had been hung on the oak had been torn off the branches.  Some of them had been broken and left scattered about the area, but a lot were missing altogether.  And there was litter, and graffiti had been carved into the main trunk of the tree."

"That we could deal with, as angry as it made us," Nancy said.  "But we didn't realise _then_ what else they'd done."

"One of the lower branches became diseased in the autumn and we had to remove it," Gwyn told Harry and Ron.  "It was then that we found the iron spike they'd hammered into a fold of the trunk near that branch - we didn't see it at first because the bark is very gnarled at that point.  Since then the tree seems to have been growing weaker."

"And last Yule the mistletoe yield was half what it was the previous year," Joe added.

"Bloody hell," Ron said.  "What did they go and do that for?"

"There are Muggle pagans and people who live alternative lifestyles," Gwyn explained.  "Ordinary Muggles can be quite negative towards them.  I suspect they think we're that sort - that's what Hermione suggested, anyway."

"You haven't heard some of the crap people say when my mum visits my grandparents," Harry told Ron, and he grimaced.  "If she dresses in her normal clothes they make comments about hippies and gypsies and unmarried mothers, and if she dresses like a Muggle they ask her if she's given up all that wild nonsense at last and settled down a bit."

Ron looked annoyed.  "And what do they say to you?"

Harry bumped shoulders with him affectionately, but turned back to Gwyn and the others.  "If it's a Master Oak, it'd have to be a pretty big spike to do that much damage," he said. 

"We think they might have coated the spike with something," Rowen said.  "Weed killer, perhaps.  Quite a small amount driven into the centre of the trunk that way, coupled with the damage and decay around the site of the spike, might be enough to slowly kill the oak."

"But it's not dead yet," Ron said, his brows drawn together thoughtfully.  "Can't something be done to fix the damage?  An herbologist like Professor Sprout at Hogwarts maybe - "

"Someone came out from Green Lady after it happened," Nancy said sadly.  "They said the damage was too deep and if there was any kind of poison on the spike it was too late to fix it."

Harry frowned at this, considering the point, but before he could say anything else, Gwyn gently changed the subject.

"That's enough of our woes.  Now - is there anyone you lads would like to send an owl to, to let them know you're safe, before we find you a room for the night?"

 

~~~

 

"This is a bit of all right, this is," Ron remarked, as the two of them settled into the guest room Nancy showed them to. 

It was certainly comfortable.  The House of the Green Lord was a lot smaller than the Running Hare Commune, but it had been built with its residents in mind and there was still a very strong sense of communal living, which was marked by the large, comfortably laid out bedrooms and the two generous shared bathrooms, one at either end of the second storey.  Nancy had pointed out how there was also room for expansion both in the roof and at the rear of the house, should it ever be needed.  She offered them a room each for the night but didn't seem at all surprised when Harry said they would share, and the room they were spending the night in was more than ample for their needs.

In fact, in Ron's eyes it was it was positively luxurious and in a way that he understood and felt comfortable with, with a lot of handmade textiles and simple but robust furniture.  He particularly liked the bed, which was broad and made of some warm golden wood and carved at the head and foot with acorn-shaped knobs topping the posts at each corner.  The floor was polished wood too, spread with warm-coloured rugs, and there were bedside tables, a couple of chairs, a large wardrobe and a long ottoman chest under the window, all made of the same golden wood as the bed.  The chairs and ottoman had thick patchwork-covered cushions on them.

The room was quite big and the furniture didn't fully fill the space; nor were there any hangings or pictures on the walls.  Ron got the impression that it was waiting for an owner to stamp his or her mark upon it.  The notion was curiously attractive to him.

Harry closed the heavy curtains over the windows and tapped his wand on the rim of one of the bowl-shaped lamps that sat on the bedside table nearest to him.  It brightened, and he left his wand and glasses next to it while he climbed onto the bed.

"It's pretty nice, but you can tell it's all new, can't you?" he remarked.

Ron raised his brows.  "What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing ..."

"Potter, what's your problem with these people?"  He was a little amused by Harry's reactions, as he always was on the rare occasion that Harry was caught out in a situation he clearly didn't understand and didn't feel entirely comfortable with.  He was such an easy-going _Hufflepuff_ , generally; it was strange to see him thrown off balance.  Especially in a place like this.

"I don't have a problem with them," Harry said defensively.

"Yeah, you do."  Ron grinned.  "All that stuff about being born and raised in the _tradition_ \- what's that about?"

"This isn't what a coven's about," Harry said, waving a hand vaguely at the walls.  "The Wicca's all about life … fertility …  How can you have a coven with no kids and no fertility rites?"

"I didn't hear them say they didn't do the rites," Ron pointed out.

Harry gave him an old-fashioned look.  "There's not a lot of point in performing fertility rites if you can't or won't have kids, Ron!"

"But it's not just about having kids … it's about the fertility of the soil and growing crops and stuff, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but the whole point of the ritual magic is … mirroring.  The coven perform the rites of life and death to propitiate the goddess and put fertility back into the soil.  You ritually kill the old king stag so that his blood enriches the soil and he makes way for a new and vigorous leader of the herd.  And the huntress and new king stag couple to raise power in the earth through their combined fertility."

"And if the huntress doesn't get pregnant, what happens then?  Does everything go wrong?  Crops fail, people die?"

"Are you taking the piss?" Harry demanded, annoyed.

"Nope."  And Ron wasn't, tempting though it was.

"Then what's your point?"

"My _point_ is that you're not making sense.  If the rites depended on the fertility of the priest and priestess, then any rite where she didn't get pregnant would be a disaster - wouldn't it?  So obviously the rite itself is more important than the people performing it.  And if that's the case then it shouldn't make a big difference if the couple can't have kids because one of them's sterile, or even if it's two blokes or two birds performing it instead of a straight couple."

Harry frowned, but he didn't immediately try to refute what Ron was saying.

"Look," Ron continued, trying to keep his tone conciliatory.  "Just because it's not _your_ tradition, doesn't mean it's wrong.  I mean, if that was true then how the hell did my Mum and Dad end up with seven kids?  They weren't shagging under an oak tree at the solstice, that's for sure."

Harry snorted, his expression lightening.  "How do _you_ know if they were or not?"

"If they were, I don't want to know about it."  Ron grinned.  "Besides, after the way you went on about Vera's kids at Yule, I should think you'd love this place."

"I don't have a problem with kids."

"Right.  You're planning to have a bunch yourself and raise them at your mum's coven, then?"

Harry opened his mouth and shut it again, looking nonplussed.  "I'm not saying I don't want kids, I just …"

"Don't want kids."  Ron stretched himself out on the thick, warm blanket that covered the bed and wriggled himself into it comfortably.  "Well, I don't mind kids but I don't want any of my own, so I reckon this place would suit me down to the ground.  They _want_ blokes like you and me - how nifty is that?"

"You'd join them?"  Harry's eyes widened with surprise.

Ron considered the question.  "Maybe I'd need to see a bit more of what they're about and I know they'd have to like the look of us too.  But right now it looks pretty good, don't you think?  I'll tell you this much …"  He hesitated, giving Harry a wary look.  "Look mate, I love my family.  You know that, right?"

The corner of Harry's mouth twitched.  "Prat.  Of course I know that."

"Well, I reckon I'd love 'em more if I didn't have to live with them."

"And why do you think I don't live with my mother all year round?"  Harry sighed and rubbed his face with one hand.  "Okay, okay - you're right.  It's not that I don't like kids, because I do, but it _would_ be pretty nice to live somewhere where I don't have to deal with someone else's if I don't want to.  Especially when it's someone like Vera, who's bloody hopeless at raising them and expects everyone else to just put up with their bad behaviour.  And hers, for that matter."

"Yeah, I noticed how when her littlest one nearly ended up in the fireplace and we fished him out, it was somehow our fault for letting him get near the fireplace in the first place," Ron said dryly.  "Up till that point I didn't know we were supposed to be watching him.  Since she was, what, two feet away? I sort of assumed that was what _she_ was supposed to be doing."

"Exactly!  I don't mind Nuala's little girls, or Rick and Ellen's three, but that's mostly because they're not always into everybody's stuff and at least Ellen and Nuala _ask_ me if I'd mind keeping an eye on them."

"I get that kind of shit from Percy and his wife when they visit," Ron said.  " _They're your nephews, you should spend some time with them._   Christmas was a barrel of laughs."

"Tell me about it.  After you left I spent most of my time trying to hide from Vera.  I was dead glad when Dad said we needed to move off again."  Harry wrinkled his nose and looked at Ron.  "Am I turning into a grumpy old git?"

Ron grinned at him.  "Nah.  You're just getting in touch with your Slytherin side."

"Oh _good!_   Look, changing the subject - I reckon we'll hear from Dad by the morning.  Unless he wants us to get out of here as fast as possible, do you mind if we hang around a bit?  I was hoping they'd let me look at their Master Oak."

Ron peered at him.  "Why?"

Harry was silent for a moment.  "You know my magic's earth magic, right?"

"Yeah."

"Well … it's a long shot, but I was wondering if it might be possible to heal the oak."  He gave Ron a tentative look.  "I'm not saying I can, just that it _might_ be possible.  And if it is, then I should try.  Do you see?  It's a Holy Oak.  I can't _not_ try to fix it, it's practically an obligation."

"Okay," Ron agreed, interested.  "But what can you do?  They said it's been poisoned.  I remember a bit of what Professor Sprout said about xylem and phloem - wouldn't that pull the poison further into the tree and spread it?  They might have been able to fix it when it was first done, but it's been months."

"Maybe," Harry said, "but it's been mostly autumn and winter months, and the tree's system will have been sort of sluggish and slow.  And it's not quite spring yet so it won't have woken up again properly.  The poison might still be contained in just one part of the trunk.  Besides, there are magics that can cleanse the tree's system and work with it so that the tree heals itself.  Sometimes all it needs is help - a sort of magical boost to its own power.  Anyway, there's no harm in looking at it."

"All right, we'll ask Gwyn in the morning."

Harry smiled.  "Great.  You know what?"

"What?" Ron asked.

"It's really brilliant that you're here.  Are you all right about it though?  You didn't mind Dad coming to get you like that, without us telling you or anything?"

"He gave me a choice," Ron admitted.  "It'd be nice to know what I'm supposed to be doing though.  I don't know anything about ley-lines and stuff."

"Neither did I at first, but Dad's been teaching me."  Harry crossed his legs under him, looking thoughtful.  "Uncle Peter says your magic works really well with mine, so they've been keen for you to join us.  We just had to wait for Dumbledore to give us the okay to bring someone else in on the job."  He gave Ron an apologetic look.  "Sorry, mate.  I've been nagging Dad about you for months, but there wasn't much he could do."

"Hm."  Weirdly, this not only made up for some of the lingering frustration Ron had been feeling about getting sacked by the twins and so on, but also made him feel a little more kindly towards James.  "Don't worry about it.  It could have been worse - I mean, in a weird way I'm glad I worked at the club.  It's experience, right?"

Harry grinned.  "That's so brilliant!  I'll bet your mum nearly flipped her lid though."

"You don't think I told her, do you?  Give it a rest, I'm not stupid!  She thinks I was working for a place like The Leaky Cauldron.  The only one who knows about the club is Gran, and I don't reckon she'd be daft enough to tell Mum of all people!"

"Was it interesting?" Harry asked curiously.  "I mean, not just _interesting_ interesting, but … hot?"

Ron made a face.  "Nah, mate, it really, really wasn't.  It was mostly weird.  And sort of funny in a way, but still weird."  He thought about his experiences for a moment, then added, "They weren't bad people, though.  They treated me all right, nobody expected me to help out with the - you know - _business_ , and I almost never saw the customers.  I just fixed stuff and helped out when anything went wrong.  But it didn't do anything for me - actually, it was pretty off-putting.  I'd get home at the end of my shift and mostly I didn't even want to wank."

"It's put you off sex?" Harry asked, sounding dismayed.

Ron looked at him and grinned.  He knew Harry was teasing him.  "Depends.  Are you planning to dress up as a hummingbird and tie me up?"

Harry sniggered.  "Not likely!  Do I look like a bloody hummingbird?"

"The funny thing is that Fuchsia really _does_ look like a hummingbird when he's costumed up … well, a bit anyway."

"Does he really have tits?"

"Yep.  Most of his costumes are designed to show 'em off.  He'll have all these spangly bits up to his waist, then the rest are painted on.  I don't think it'd work for most blokes, but he's pretty small and part-veela too."

"Well, I don't have tits," Harry said.  He uncurled himself, rising to his knees, and in a move that commanded Ron's attention completely, he seemed to shed his grey-blue kaftan like a second skin.

His flesh was winter pale and the hair that curled about his nipples and marched down his belly was black.  It narrowed to a fine line below his bellybutton until it reached the base of his cock where it thickened into wild and tangled black curls that nestled about his balls.  His cock was already stiff, jutting out from his body as though reaching out to Ron in invitation.

Ron took one look at Harry's lazy, hungry grin and felt the blood rush to his own groin almost painfully.  He didn't move though.

"Are you going to let me tie you up?" he asked provocatively.

"I might, one day," Harry said.  He straddled Ron's hips and pulled the loose lacing at the neck of the kaftan undone, pushing it open down to his middle.  He bent over Ron and ran his tongue around first one nipple then the other, while his cock nudged Ron's tantalisingly through the thick cloth.  "Not tonight, though.  Tonight I'm going to ride your cock."

"Hm-hm."  Ron grabbed his head and pulled him up until they could kiss deeply.  Even that felt amazing after the time they'd spent apart and he wrapped his arms around Harry, grabbing hold of his firm arse and rolling them onto their sides, where they rubbed against each other urgently, almost biting each other's lips.

Abruptly Harry pushed him away, panting.  "Get this robe off while I find some oil or something," he commanded, and before Ron could stop him he was rolling off the bed and trotting over to where they'd left their packs by the door.

Ron got up reluctantly and pulled the kaftan off, throwing it over a chair with Harry's.  He stretched luxuriously for a moment, enjoying the pull of his muscles and the deep pleasant ache in his balls, then turned his head to watch Harry, who bent over their packs, rummaging.  His erection throbbed and he stroked it idly with his fingertips, thinking about how much he had missed this - just being able to press against Harry and all but climb inside his skin.

Then Harry straightened up and came back to the bed, carrying a small blue glass jar in one hand.  "This should do," he said, tossing the jar onto the bed.  He pushed Ron back until the backs of his knees hit the edge of the bed and he was forced to sit down, then Harry knelt on the rug in front of him and insinuated himself between his legs.  Smiling at Ron, he bent his head and took his friend's cock in his mouth.

Ron sighed deeply and slowly sagged back onto his elbows as Harry licked and sucked him.  This was only a pale shade of what he really wanted, but he wasn't about to stop him; Harry's hot, wet, wonderfully talented tongue felt too good.  Harry didn't let him enjoy it for too long, though; all too soon he released Ron and stood up, grinning at his friend's near-boneless state of relaxation.

"Come on, move!" he said, pinching Ron's knee gently, and Ron reluctantly dragged himself back up the bed until he was propped up against the pillows.  Harry unscrewed the lid of the jar and put it on the bedside table, then grabbed his wand and flicked a quick silencing spell at the door.  Then he climbed onto the bed and straddled Ron again.  He pushed the jar into Ron's hand, and leaned forward on his hands and knees.  "I'm not doing all the work," he said softly, his warm breath and lips brushing Ron's mouth tantalisingly.  "You can get me ready."

Ron scooped two fingers' worth of the thick, clear gel out of the jar and with one hand on Harry's arse pulled him closer so that he could work the slippery stuff into him.  Harry sighed deeply, running his tongue around the curve of Ron's ear, then moving lower so that he could nip and suck on his throat.

"Feels so good …" he mumbled as Ron slipped his fingers into him, probing, stretching him, searching for his prostate.

"Fuck …" Ron muttered hoarsely as Harry nibbled his Adam's apple.  He couldn't wait much longer.  "Are you ready?"

Harry groaned, then gasped as Ron's questing fingers hit the right spot.  "Fuck, yes!"  He scrambled back, reaching for Ron's erection behind him then rising up to ease himself onto it.

Ron choked back a cry and squeezed his eyes shut, seeing stars for a moment as Harry rocked, working them together carefully … it had been too long since the last time to rush the moment.  Then he was fully sheathed.  Harry grabbed his hand, wrapping it around his own erection, and began to move, first slowly then more urgently.  Ron did as he was bidden, stroking and tugging on Harry's cock, and fondling his firm balls.  Harry groaned again, leaning back and balancing himself with his hands gripping Ron's slightly raised knees as he moved.

Neither of them could last long.  For once it was Harry who came first, shouting and spilling over Ron's belly as he ground himself frantically against him.  He paused for a moment or two once he was spent, eyes closed and head hanging back, gasping for breath.  Then he pulled himself forwards, propping himself up with his hands either side of Ron, and began to move again more slowly and rhythmically, clenching around Ron's cock until at length he too cried out and came hard.

Utterly sated, it took the two of them several minutes before they recovered enough to separate, use charms to clean themselves up, and climb beneath the covers.  Neither felt the need for words, however.  Harry dimmed the light with a wave of his hand and the pair curled into each other, falling into a deep and grateful slumber.

 **End Part 2**


	3. Chapter 3

**Part 3**

Harry was partially awoken in the early hours of the morning by sounds below that suggested someone had arrived at the house.  For a vague moment he wondered if it was his father and uncles, but he was entirely too warm and comfortable to wake up properly to investigate; he told himself that if he was wanted someone would probably bang on the door and he drifted back to sleep, tucked into the curve of Ron's back.

When he next awoke it was to the weak light of a late winter morning edging around the curtains.  Ron was lying on his back, snoring softly, and for a little while Harry lay there quite contentedly, appreciating all the little things that came with sharing a bed with his lover - the smell of male sweat and musk on the bedding, the heat of his body against his side, the rough sound of his breathing; just the reality of his presence there with him.  When Ron showed no sign of rousing himself, Harry sat up on one elbow to look at him.

His red hair was bleached-looking and messy in the half-light, and he was utterly boneless and relaxed, his face slack.  Harry reached under the covers to gently rub his chest, feeling prickly soft hair under his fingertips, then ran his hand lightly down Ron's belly until he reached his crotch.  He fondled him, making Ron grunt softly in his sleep, his cock stiffening under Harry's hand for a moment or two, but he still didn't wake.  For a moment Harry considered waking him up with a blow-job, but if Ron was this deeply asleep he probably wouldn't appreciate it as much as he should.

Smiling to himself, Harry released him and pulled the covers back up under Ron's chin, before sliding out from under them himself, slipping his glasses on and padding softly across to the wardrobe.  Nancy had told them the night before that there were towels and bathrobes in there; Harry grabbed one of each, dug his wash-kit out of his pack and set off to find the nearest bathroom.

He was not the only one awake.  He could hear sounds from the ground floor and as he approached a door with a plaque on it saying "bathroom", the door opened to release a shaft of yellow witchlight and a waft of rosemary-scented steam.  There was a soft gasp of surprise.

"Sorry," he said at once, stepping back.

"No, it's all right - I didn't see you there."  The voice was female and vaguely familiar, and as the towel-wrapped form emerged Harry recognised her.  "Harry?  What are you doing here?"

"Susan?"  Harry was mildly surprised to see his former housemate Susan Bones here.  The Bones family was an old and pureblooded one, and not really the type to follow the Wicca.  "We arrived last night - we got caught out in the storm."

"That was lucky," she remarked.  "We decided to take cover for a while and didn't arrive home till a few hours ago."

"You live here?"

"Oh yes, for over a year now."  Susan smiled as she stepped around him.  "If you don't mind … it's cold here on the landing.  I'll see you at breakfast, I expect."

The bathroom was tiled with something like cork (although Harry thought it might be some other natural fibre) and contained a nice big claw-footed bathtub and two shower stalls as well as the other usual accoutrements.  He enjoyed a leisurely shower, washing his hair and shaving, then he returned to the bedroom to dress.

Ron drifted awake just as he finished getting dressed; Harry kissed him, ruffled his hair and left him to make his own ablutions, while he went downstairs to see if any message had arrived from his father.

Nancy was making porridge in the kitchen, accompanied by another young woman who looked vaguely familiar to Harry.  She had brown frizzy hair that was trying to escape from a thick French braid, and she was sitting at the kitchen table with her chin propped on her hand, clearly having a hard time staying awake.

Nancy smiled at him and gestured to a large glazed earthenware teapot into the middle of the table.  "Good morning!  Help yourself to tea.  Did you sleep well?"

"Yes, thanks."  Harry took a mug and filled it from the pot.

"This is Hermione," Nancy continued.  "You might already know each other - you look to be much the same age, so you would have been at Hogwarts at the same time."

Harry glanced at Hermione, trying to place her.  "Granger of Gryffindor?" he said finally.

She nodded and waggled her fingers in greeting, but her eyes remained shut.

"You should go back to bed," Nancy told her, amused.

But Hermione shook her head.  "If I sleep too late now, I won't sleep tonight.  I'll wake up in a minute."

Harry poured her a mug of tea and slid it across the table.

"Thanks."  She opened her eyes and squinted at him.  "Potter of Hufflepuff, isn't it?  The Seeker."

"That's right."

"There's an owl for you, Harry," Nancy said.  She took a folded piece of paper off the welsh dresser and handed it to him.  "Came by a beautiful snowy owl - is she yours?  She's having breakfast and a nap in the owl-loft at the moment."

"Yes, that's Hedwig … thank you."  Harry pulled the note open to find his father's spiky writing.

 

_We ran into some other business overnight, so we'll come and meet you when we're done.  Stay put at this coven of yours for another night if they'll let you, or go to the Green Lady if not. - Dad._

 

Harry looked up at Nancy.  "Would you mind if we stayed another night?" he asked her.  "My people can't get here straight away."

"It's no bother, but the usual rules apply," she said.  "You pay for your board by helping us out with odd jobs around the property."

"Of course."  This was a common custom in the pagan community.

"You'll be sorry you said that," Hermione remarked sleepily.  "There's plenty of jobs in the orchard and greenhouses."

Harry grinned.  "I don't mind, and I don't suppose Ron will either."

"We could show you the beehives.  That's what Susan's studying - beekeeping.  Gwyn's an expert apiarist."

"Cool," Harry said, impressed.  "Is that why you live here?"

She opened one eye for a moment and the corner of her mouth twitched.  "Partly.  I'm studying Magical Law, though."

"There's strong magic in bees," Nancy commented.  "Susan shows a lot of promise."

"Do you keep a lot of hives?" Harry asked them, interested.  "I know some covens have one or two, but that's usually a casual thing."

"We have nine at the moment," Hermione replied.  She was growing more alert, perhaps because the topic interested her.  "It's one of the businesses that helps to finance the coven.  From spring onwards we set the hives out in the orchard, but it was a cold winter this year so we moved them into one of the glasshouses."

To Harry it seemed significant (although how significant he wasn't sure) that beekeeping was practised here, for bees had an important role in pagan lore and magic.  He pondered the scraps of information he'd picked up from his mother over the years, as he sipped his tea - of how hives were almost exclusively female environments and seen in some ancient cultures as the womb of the Mother Goddess, and how bees were believed to be messengers between worlds.  Then there was honey, beeswax and royal jelly, all of which were remarkable substances and had many uses in magic.

But in this context, quite frankly, he didn't know what to make of it all.

Then Ron walked into the kitchen with Susan and Joe, and he and Hermione clapped eyes on each other.

If they'd been a pair of cats, Harry thought, amused, there would have been a great deal of fluffed fur and hissing.  Hermione's expression slid into one of cool disdain almost at once, while Ron went from being relaxed and cheerful to stiff and wooden-faced, although probably only Harry - and perhaps Hermione herself - would recognise this as him hiding his annoyance.  Hermione, of course, had been a prefect for three years at school, while Ron had managed to get into a fair amount of trouble even for a Slytherin.  And now that Harry came to think of it, Hermione had probably been that "poxy Gryffindor know-it-all with her nose in everyone else's business" whom Ron had grumbled about more than once.

Ron took a seat next to Harry without a word and concentrated on ignoring the girl opposite him.  Amused, and with no personal issues against Hermione himself, Harry said a cheerful good morning to everyone and observed with interest as Susan dropped a kiss on top of Hermione's head as she reached over her shoulder for the teapot.  That probably explained a lot about the pair of them being with the coven in the first place. 

Then he wondered if this development would make Ron reconsider his enthusiasm for the coven, and this amused him so much that he had to hide his grin behind his mug.

 

~~~

 

His amusement didn't last long.  Ron and Harry began 'paying' for their board by helping Rowen with the laundry; charming clothes and bedding into the big dolly-tub in a room off the kitchen and setting the dolly to plunging it over and over in the water, then wrestling the wet cloth through a big mangle.

"It's a lot like Muggle Youth Hostelling, don't you think?" Hermione said brightly at one point.  "Paying for your board by working."

"Never done it," Harry said mildly, wishing she would go away.

She seemed to be spending a lot of time hanging around and watching them, to what purpose Harry couldn't quite fathom unless it was to annoy Ron.  Unfortunately this seemed entirely too likely - breakfast had been full of subtly barbed _sotto voce_ exchanges between them - and it worried Harry for he knew what Ron's temper was like.  But Ron had not worked for the twins for as long as he had without learning to grit his teeth and ignore deliberate provocation; he got on with their tasks with a stolid expression and confined any comments he had to make to Harry and Rowen.  Which didn't entirely reassure Harry, it had to be said.  He knew Ron well enough that when his friend helped Rowen to carry some wet sheets outside to the washing lines in the kitchen garden, he hung back to speak to Hermione.

"Can you _not_ keep trying to wind him up?" he asked her bluntly.

Hermione raised her brows.  "I don't know what you're talking about."

That annoyed him.  "There's a saying in my home coven," he warned her.  "If the gods trip themselves on your lying tongue, they'll trip you in return."  She scowled.  "Leave Ron alone.  Just because he's ignoring you now doesn't mean he won't remember later."

"I'm trembling," she retorted.

"You should be," Harry said irritably.  "He's a championship chess-player - which means he's probably already one step ahead of you.  Think about that."

He left her in the laundry room and took a basket of wet clothes outside.  The walled kitchen garden was looking as wind-blown and ragged as any garden did before spring set in.  Apart from some onions and garlic that had been left to over-winter in a sheltered plot, the beds had been turned in the autumn and covered with chopped straw mulch to discourage weed growth until it was time for planting again.  Everything was wet and muddy from the previous day's deluge, but the sun had come out and there was a brisk breeze; almost too brisk for Harry, whose old Hufflepuff shirt wasn't nearly as warm as it looked.

Ron came to help him peg out the clothes.

"Are you okay?" Harry asked him quietly.  "Try to ignore her."

The corner of Ron's mouth twitched.  "Can I drown her in the washtub?"

"Maybe another time.  What's going on between you two?  How many detentions did she give you at school anyway?"

"Not enough or the right sort to suit her, I reckon."

Harry blinked at him.  Ron's tone that suggested something he hadn't expected.  "Ron?"

Ron looked at him and his brows went up.  "She's not my type, you know that."

"I wouldn't have thought you were _her_ type!  She's shacked up with Susan I think - "  Ron gave him knowing look and Harry blinked again.  "Okay ... but I don't see what her problem is if she's with someone else now."

"Well, it's not like she ever really _liked_ me," Ron pointed out.  "Even if she fancied me - and don't ask me if she did, _I_ don't know - it didn't stop her shopping me for all sorts of crap.  I reckon she spent half her time looking for stuff to take points off me for.  Maybe it was a love-hate thing - she loved my arse but hated my personality."

Harry grinned.  "I love your arse myself!"

"Of course you do," Ron said with a smirk.  "You're only human."

Harry flicked at him with a wet towel, making Ron duck and laugh.

 

~~~

 

A little later they helped to scour and stack terracotta plant pots outside the long potting shed, and Ron got to show off some of his many new repairing charms on the pots as well as on several broken panes of glass on the sides and roofs of the glasshouses.  Then Gwyn and Susan showed them the beehives - from a respectful distance, as Gwyn was at pains to explain, for Ron and Harry were unknown to the semi-dormant colonies and their magical auras might disturb them.

The hives were bigger than Ron had imagined and it was sobering to see them all set out, evenly spaced, in the two long greenhouses beyond the kitchen garden.  If there was much activity going on inside them, he couldn't tell.  But when the weather became warmer they would be moved out to the orchard and Gwyn confidently predicted a couple of swarms which, carefully managed, could increase the number of colonies.

It was odd to hear the coven members talking like this.  On the one hand there was a strong sense that they felt things were coming to a premature end with the predicted death of the Master Oak - but on the other, they still talked about future projects like hive management and increases.  Ron supposed that some of them would stay on in the house, managing the orchard and hives, even if the coven disbanded.  Something would be missing though and even he could sense that.

He wondered if Harry really could do anything to save the oak.  He didn't pretend to understand the religious significance of the tree but he'd seen first-hand how much the Running Hare Coven venerated their sacred oak and how carefully it was cared for.  Presumably the Green Lord Coven felt the same way about theirs.

Harry broached the subject of the oak when they left the greenhouses and went around the house to see what damage had been done in the orchard during the previous night's storm.

Gwyn was wary.  "The dendrologist at Green Lady Coven said there was nothing to be done - the poison's in the trunk and too deep to do much about without causing more damage in the process.  We've not even removed the spike for fear of other infections making matters worse."

"I wasn't thinking about physical work on the tree," Harry said.  "In terms of magic - "

"The specialist said even magical healing wouldn't help at this stage," Hermione interrupted him.

"And I wasn't talking about ordinary magic," Harry said.

"If a qualified magical dendrologist with decades of experience can't do anything for the tree, then what makes you think you can?" she demanded.

Ron's own annoyance at her lecturing tone was tempered by amusement at Harry's reaction; to anyone who didn't know him he'd seem quite calm, but Ron knew that tone of voice.  Harry hesitated for a moment, his normally open and mobile face quite still, and Ron had to chew on the inside of his cheek to suppress inappropriate laughter.  Then Harry looked at Gwyn, tilting his head to one side.  "The tree's dying, right?"

"So they tell us," Gwyn said heavily.

"Then what's to be lost by trying something unconventional?"

Hermione opened her mouth and Gwyn raised his hand in a mild gesture that silenced her.  He was looking at Harry quite thoughtfully.  "What did you have in mind?"

"I'm not sure," Harry admitted, "but if you'd let me - and Ron - take a look at the tree, I might be able to tell you."

"You'll not touch it?"

"Touch it, yes.  Harm it - no, certainly not.  You have my oath on that."

Gwyn considered this for a moment or two, then glanced back over his shoulder to where Nancy stood in the front porch of the house.  Some sort of silent conversation seemed to go on between them, then Gwyn turned back to Harry.  "I'll show you the oak tree."

Small hope that Hermione would leave them alone to get on with it.  In fact, everyone turned out to follow them out of the immediate grounds of the house and down a lane between the several small fields that were part of the coven's accumulated property.

"This is the boundary with our nearest neighbour," Rowen pointed out at one point, although he really didn't need to - even Ron could feel the presence of the wards where they were anchored in the hedge that separated two fields. 

The oak was in the corner of the next field and like the one at Running Hare Coven it backed onto a stand of other trees, although not the established woodland that Running Hare's Master Oak was set in.  Ron could see from looking at it that it was a younger tree, although 'younger' was relative in the lives of oaks and this one could still be a hundred years old.  But it wasn't quite so massive or gnarled and although its canopy was broad there was still plenty of room for it to grow.  It certainly didn't look like a tree that was dying, although that was harder to judge at the tail end of winter. 

The wound where the diseased branch had been removed was clearly visible.  Gwyn pointed out the head of the spike; it wasn't immediately obvious but two things struck Ron as he peered at it, for he was taller than any of the others.

"There had to be more than one of them," he said, "because that's higher than I could reach to hammer it in, so the one doing the job probably sat on someone else's shoulders.  And it went in at a bit of an angle, I reckon."

"That's what we think," Rowen said.

"The specialist from Green Lady seemed to think it might have hit a knot in the grain," Susan added.

"I don't suppose you contacted the Muggle authorities after it happened, did you?" Harry asked, walking slowly around the trunk of the tree without touching it.

"We have as little to do with them as possible," Gwyn said.  "Besides, they'd never cross the wards."

"Pity.  Because this is a criminal offence under Muggle law, and the kind of people their councils employ to look after trees wouldn't have a problem with you being a coven.  They're used to tree-lovers being a bit different.  They'd have gone after the people that did this, although I don't know what they could have done after all that time, I have to admit."

"That's what I said at the time," Hermione agreed grudgingly.  "But I don't think there's anything they can do unless they catch the vandal in the act."

Harry shrugged.  "It's just that something like this - it's not just vandalism.  You have to know a bit about trees to know this kind of damage would kill it, so whoever did it has probably done crap like this before."

He finished his circuit of the oak before finally bowing respectfully, stepping close and reaching out to touch it - initially just a gentle hand against the trunk, palm flat against the knobbly and grooved bark, then both hands, until finally he leaned his whole body against it, arms reaching out around the trunk and his cheek pressed against it.  Ron saw his eyes close and he was very still for a while, just breathing deeply.

"What does he think he's doing?" Hermione grumbled in the background.

"Hush!" Gwyn told her.

Harry blinked and glanced around, looking for Ron.  "Hey mate, come here a minute.  See if you can feel this."

"I don't have your knack for stuff like this," Ron said doubtfully, but he stepped up close to Harry and allowed his friend to take his right hand and press it to the damp bark under his own.

"Feel it?"

Ron was ready to say no, when he realised that he actually _could_ feel something - a thin tickle of magic at the far reaches of his awareness, almost like a humming at the back of his head.  He was so startled that he jumped back.  "Merlin!"

Harry grinned at him.  "Feel it?  That's the tree!"

"Kidding me …"

"Honest!"

"Should it do that?"  Ron approached again more warily but didn't try to touch the tree again.

"It's sound a lot louder in the summer."  Harry stepped back too, brushing absently at the damp marks left on his jumper.  "It _sounds_ normal for this time of year, but the power - I can't quite explain it, but I can feel a sort of weakness in the flow around the spike, and there's definitely some kind of poison on it.  There's a … a diversion in the tree's own magic, and it doesn't seem to be a problem right now but it will be when the tree starts to wake up properly.  It's starting to wake up a little already."

"So what can we do?"

At that, Harry seemed to remember that the two of them weren't alone and turned to look at Gwyn and the others.  The variety of expressions on the faces of the coven members made Ron feel a little wary, but Gwyn's interest in Harry was intense.

"That depends on whether you're willing to let us try - and support us, if you can," Harry said directly to him.

"Try what?" Hermione demanded, before Gwyn could say anything.  "You're not qualified tree experts, you're not even experienced warlocks and you're not - "

"Hermione," Susan interrupted her, and she took the other girl's hand.  "This is Gwyn and Nancy's decision!"

"It's the _coven's_ Master Oak," Joe pointed out.

"But Gwyn's our high priest," Rowen said.  Neither he nor Joe seemed to have any particular axe to grind; they were just stating facts.

Gwyn ignored them.  Once again he looked across to Nancy, raising a brow at her, then he turned back to Harry.  "You can feel the tree's magic," he said mildly.

"It's the sort of magic I do," Harry said.  "Earth magic." 

Ron thought he detected a note of reluctance in this admission, which didn't surprise him.  He hadn't found out about Harry's connection to earth magic himself until he'd spent some time with Harry and his uncles the previous summer - and James had told him, not Harry himself.  Harry's comment about it the previous night was the first time he'd actually said anything to Ron directly.

"So now you've got a special kind of magic!" Hermione said scornfully.  She seemed incapable of letting the argument go, not that Ron was surprised.  He had significant prior experience of her tenacity in a number of areas.

"Hermione, lass," Gwyn said, still in the same mild tone, "your scholarly achievements are admirable for someone so young, but you don't know everything about magic yet.  Don't scoff at Harry until he's had a chance to explain why he feels so confident about this."

"I don't," Harry said at once.  "I mean - I don't know that I can heal the tree.  But I _think_ I might be able to and since the poison will kill it sooner or later, it seems like it's worth me trying."

"But you have earth magic," Nancy said kindly.  "That's very rare, and you told us yourself that you're a halfblood.  Were you born with the gift?  Is it in your family?"

Harry hesitated again, then reluctantly nodded.  "I was born after my parents performed one of the Great Rites," he explained.  "I'm the son of a Huntress and King Stag."

"Ah!"  Gwyn let out a long breath.  "That explains a few things - the buzz you made in the wards when the two of you arrived and the power you created last night.  Herne knows all the Stags in the Herd … and of course you would have earth magic, how could you not?  Offspring of the Great Rites are seeded with power in the womb."

None of this made a great deal of sense to Ron, although he could see that it meant something to the coven as well as to Gwyn.  All except Hermione, who looked puzzled and annoyed. 

"Come back to the house," Nancy suggested quietly.  "This should be talked about properly, not out here in the cold."

 

~~~

 

They sat around the same table where they'd eaten supper together the night before, and Joe and Susan made a spicy herbal tea for them all.  The atmosphere was a little tense, not relieved by Gwyn's thoughtful and introspective silence until they were all served with a mug of the tea and waiting for him to speak.  Then he looked up and his slate grey eyes fixed on Harry intensely.

"The Sacred Hunt has more significance for us than I think you realise, Young Stag," he said.

"I guessed that," Harry said.  "Herne _is_ the Lord of the Hunt and the Huntress dedicates to him before the Great Rite.  The spilling of blood and seed is made in his name as well as the Great Mother's."

"But can you imagine what the Hunt means to us?"

"Do you perform it?"  Harry was unsure how he felt about that, remembering their rule about no young children in the house.

"We do, at Beltane and Samhain."  Gwyn paused, his eyes resting on Harry's face.  "Those who wish to stand up for the rite put their names forward to me and both participants must have agreed to stand up together.  We maintain the same principle in the rite as in the founding of our hearth - it doesn't matter to us if there's a Hunter rather than a Huntress or the Stag is a Doe.  But I'll admit I've wondered more than once if our purpose here is a flawed conceit and that I mistook the dreams Herne sent to me that led us here in the first place."

Harry draw a cautious breath.  "Last night Ron and I … we talked about that, because this is the first coven I've heard of that hasn't any children and I thought it wouldn't work.  But Ron pointed out that fertility isn't everything with the rites - a lot of it is about the magic.  And covens don't exist just for fertility anyway."

"Of course they don't," Nancy said, smiling at him.  "Covens exist for _life_ \- for the people who live in them, whoever they are.  Only misguided people think we live together just for sex!"

"You told me that," Ron said to Harry dryly.  "Remember?  When I told you Mum thought covens were full of sex maniacs and nudists."

This prompted a ripple of laughter around the table and everyone relaxed a little.

"Yeah, yeah - _you're_ right again, all right," Harry retorted good-naturedly, and he nudged Ron gently in the ribs with an elbow.

After a pause, Gwyn said, "What you have to understand is that after all this time - performing the Rites faithfully and living together as we believe Herne wishes us to live - it was a terrible shock to have our Master Oak harmed that way.  For all of us it felt as though the previous auspices had misled us and we began to question a lot.  To ask ourselves if this house wasn't meant to be after all."  He took a long breath too.  "And then you come here, a Young Stag in the first flush of your power, and offer to heal our oak.  I've been a high priest for many years and I'm not the kind of moon-struck fool to see Herne's arrow everywhere, but this!  It's hard not to see it as something foretold."

Harry wondered what Gwyn would think when his father turned up too, and quickly decided it would be better not to tell him.  The man had enough to contemplate at the moment.

Hermione was frowning again.  "But it's not as though you meant to come here, is it?" she pointed out.  "I thought you were going somewhere else?"

"We were given directions to another coven, one I don't know," Harry said.  "I know we went off course in the bad weather, but I don't think we were _that_ far off course.  And Gwyn has said he doesn't know of a coven called White Mare either, which is a bit odd because I would have expected him to know all the nearest covens.  So I'm thinking the message we got was a bit … garbled.  Wouldn't be the first time."

"But why were you heading there anyway?"

"Is that any of your business?" Ron asked her irritably, before Harry could reply.

Hermione bristled at his tone, but Susan quickly stepped in.  "Hermione, he's right - that's none of our business unless they choose to tell us."

"Let's talk about what we came into the house to discuss, shall we?" Nancy added in a peaceable tone.

"There's no reason to think he can do anything to help the oak," Hermione said, exasperated.  "I don't see - "

Gwyn raised his eyes to her face and she abruptly fell silent, although Harry couldn't see anything but kindness in his expression.  "If you'll have patience, I believe you may have an opportunity here to learn something new.  We all may.  Harry at least deserves the courtesy of a proper discussion of his offer, I know you'll agree."

Harry doubted that, but she let it go and sat back, holding her mug before her like a barrier.

"Trees have their own magic," he said quickly, to fill the sudden silence.  He was still addressed himself to Gwyn, mostly because it was obviously Gwyn who would have the final say over whether anything was done.  "With a smaller injury an oak that size could have healed itself - maybe not quickly or without losing some limbs, but it could have recovered.  But it's a big injury and the poison's in there, waiting for the tree to wake up this spring.  Which it's doing now, very slowly.  I think - I believe - that if we can boost its own energy and magic now, the oak will heal itself and with our help it can do it quickly before the poison spreads."

"And how do you propose to help it?"

Harry hesitated.  "With a power-raising rite.  Something like one of the Great Rites would be the most appropriate, because they're specifically geared towards rebirth and re-growth."

"Except that we're over two months away from Beltane," Rowen commented, "and the nearest Sabbat is Ostara, which isn't much sooner."

"I don't think that would make a lot of difference for this," Harry said.  "In fact, it might be better if it's _not_ a Sabbat, because that could confuse the issue.  This needs to be specifically targeted at the oak."

"It's the dark of the moon tonight," Susan remarked.

"Better still for our purposes," Nancy said.  "The Goddess turns her face away at moon-dark, so there'll be no conflict there.  Gwyn?"

He was staring into his cup, deep in thought, but at this he looked up at Harry.  "Who would you perform the rite with?"

"I could perform it on my own if necessary - "

Hermione snorted rudely.

"No, he's right," Rowen said.  "Someone with a direct earth magic connection can raise power through masturbation. Sex is sex in that respect, even if it's a solitary act, and spilling semen directly into the earth has its own significance."

"But I'd rather perform it with Ron," Harry said.

"Are you sure?" Nancy asked.  "It's the coven's Master Oak, and you're not proclaimed one of us.  Surely a representative of the hearth should be a part of this."

Ron shifted in his seat rather noticeably.

"I honestly don't think that matters," Harry told Nancy, "and in any case I know I can raise the power with Ron.  I don't have the same relationship with any of you."

"But does Ron understand what this involves?" Gwyn asked.  He smiled apologetically at Ron.  "Don't take the question amiss, but you admitted yourself last night that you don't have the background in this life.  I won't allow anyone to participate in a rite of this kind unless he or she understands fully what's expected of them and is wholehearted and willing.  Have you ever even observed a Great Rite, lad?"

Ron cleared his throat, sounding a little nervous.  "No …  Harry's told me a bit about it, though."

"I'd be happy to talk you through it," Hermione said in a deceptively casual voice, before anyone else could reply.

Harry felt a stab of annoyance at her deliberate needling of Ron, but Ron was quicker to respond.

"Have _you_ ever done it?" he shot at her, and when she seemed stumped for a quick answer he snorted witheringly.  "Thought not!  It'd take a couple of crowbars and a blasting hex to get _your_ chastity belt off, Granger."

"Like you'd know anything about it!" she snapped, unaccountably red in the face.

Ron's sudden grin was alarmingly saturnine.  "Oh - you _want_ me to tell everyone, do you?"

"Hey!" Susan said indignantly, and Harry had to grab Ron's arm to get his attention.

"Cut it out!" he told his partner sharply.

Ron scowled.  "But she - "

"What does it matter?  Let it go!  We've more important things to do."

Ron's fierce blue eyes met his own and Harry was reminded of more than one argument he'd had with him over the years.  Ron was virtually incapable of walking away from quarrels like this - it was partly the Slytherin attitude to challenges and the overwhelming need to win, but also something Harry thought had been ingrained in him since childhood.  He also had no respect for people who backed away from confrontations (something which probably explained his bitter resentment of his circumstances since he left school), which meant there was nothing for it but for Harry to face him down when he got like this.

Not that Harry had any doubts about his own ability to bring Ron to heel.  However little Ron might be prepared to admit it, in their relationship Harry led and he followed; the trick was in managing it so that Ron didn't lose face in the process.  Fortunately he had a sense of humour, which helped.

Harry met his glare and held it until he could see the realisation in Ron's eyes that he wasn't going to win this by attitude alone, then he took the sting out of the conquest:

"Look, you can fight over which of you has the biggest dick later, all right?"

Ron snorted and looked away, relaxing.  Harry doubted he'd really let it go - he was sure it would surface again later somehow, when they weren't occupied with other more important matters.  But for now they could get on with saving the oak tree and with any luck by the time Ron had a chance to remember his grievance they would be leaving the Green Lord Coven anyway.

And if not, then Hermione would just have to deal with it.  Harry doubted she was equipped to take on Ron at his worst, but that was her problem.  She must surely know him well enough by now, and if she didn't have the common sense to stop picking at him then Harry didn't have much sympathy for her.

He turned back to Gwyn and the others and was disconcerted to see them smiling at him.  Granted Hermione was in a high temper, and Susan looked rather put out too, but the others seemed to view the brief confrontation with amusement.

The corner of Gwyn's mouth was twitching gently, but all he said was, "I have to insist you ensure that Ron fully understands what this involves before I'll consider allowing the two of you to undertake the rite together.  Most people who've lived in a coven for several years would hesitate to volunteer, so it's asking a lot of a stranger to our ways to make such a commitment, even with a partner they're comfortable with."

He was right, Harry knew.  His own father had performed the rite with only minimal preparation or knowledge; James might make jokes about it now, but Harry strongly suspected it had come as a shock to him all the same.  He didn't actually talk about it much if he could help it.

"Then I'll talk to him," he said, but he didn't move.  "If we do this - and it doesn't matter who does it or how - we'll need to ward the area around the tree to stop any interference from local ley-lines and such."

"Why?" Joe asked, puzzled.

"There's one running very close to the tree's root system," Harry explained.  "I felt it when I got close.  With the power we'll be raising, we have to ward the tree or the ley-line could be drawn to it and ... we'll, actually I'm not sure what'd happen but I don't think I'd enjoy it much.  Or the tree, for that matter."

"Ley-lines are passive magic," Hermione said, seemingly unable to stop herself.  "They don't carry enough power - "

"You're an expert, are you?" Harry demanded, exasperated.  Why was she so determined to be in opposition to everything he said?

"Are you?" she shot back.

"No, but my father is and so was my grandfather.  And unless you've been making an exclusive study of the subject since you left school, I still know more about them than you do!  If I say I don't want to find out what'll happen if we hold a Great Rite practically on top of one, you can be sure I'm not saying it for the fun of it!"

"Is there any possibility that we can discuss this in a non-confrontational manner?" Nancy asked in a weary tone.  "It doesn't bode well for the success of the rite if we can't even talk about it amicably."

Harry had to bite his lip not to say anything for a moment.  He took a slow, discreet breath and reminded himself that he was a guest in their house; it behoved him to be conciliatory.  "I'm sorry," he said sincerely, when he felt he had himself under control again.  "I seem to be causing a lot of friction and that wasn't what I wanted at all.  The rite was just a suggestion.  If you'd rather not do it - or you'd prefer to postpone it for now - "

"No," Gwyn said firmly, breaking in.  Harry was mildly surprised by the decisive note in his voice.  "No, we should do this and do it tonight.  This is too clear an opportunity, with the two of you coming here at this precise moment.  This chance has been presented to us and I feel very strongly that to turn it down would surely be the end of us as a coven.  It's a shame we aren't a full house today, but this is the way Herne wishes it to be.  So let's talk about what needs to be done."

 

~~~

 

Harry took Ron out into the orchard just before lunch - not that anyone was going to eat lunch.  In preparation for the rite that evening the whole household would fast until dusk, breaking it only to drink a special potion that Nancy and Susan were preparing over the main fireplace even now.

There were many other things to be done before then, most specifically the warding of the oak and the building of a small shelter under its broad canopy.  This was being done by Gwyn, Hermione and Rowen, while Joe prepared the pigments used to ritually mark the participants.

Meanwhile, Harry had to talk Ron through the rite and explain precisely what would happen, what everyone would do, and how this related to the two of them.  If, that was, Ron agreed to participate with Harry when he knew.  In the privacy of his own mind Harry admitted to some doubts about this.

The orchard was soggy and rather dismal in the weak sunlight.  Harry deliberately led Ron along a different path to the one they'd walked when they first arrived, until they eventually came to a lonely little marble figurine among the trees; wet leaves clung to him and moisture dripped from both his antlers and his proud, outsized phallus.

"Bit different from the one at your coven," Ron noted, as they took it in turns to fondle the head of the Grove God's penis in the common tribute to him.

"More like Cernunnos or Herne," Harry agreed.  "Makes sense here."

"What are you thinking?  You've got a funny look on your face."

"I was wondering if my dad was going to turn up before tonight."  It wasn't exactly a lie; that was certainly one of the many things on Harry's mind at the moment.  He looked at Ron and grinned wryly.  "It'll be bad enough if they turn up afterwards, but if they arrive just as we're about to start I'll never hear the last of it."

Ron wasn't deflected.  "You didn't tell Gwyn you haven't done this rite before yourself."

"I'm pretty sure he knows that.  Besides, I _have_ been involved in the Great Rites before, just not as a main participant, and that's not exactly unusual at Running Hare.  But I've attended some of the Great Rites on and off since I was a kid, so nothing much about it's going to be strange to me."  Harry folded his arms and looked at Ron.  "How do you feel about this?"

"No bloody idea.  I thought you said the rite's a ritual hunt?"

"It is when it's performed at Beltane and Samhain, but it's different for the other major Sabbats.  Obviously we'll be leaving that part out tonight since it's not relevant."

"Obviously," Ron muttered.  He dug his hands into the pockets in his robe and Harry couldn't read the expression on his face.  "So basically, we're going to shag under the oak tree.  Right?"

"It's a bit more complicated than that, but - yeah."

"How does that help the tree?"

"Sex is power," Harry said.  " _Any_ kind of sex generates power, even wanking, but there's more power when it's two people and there's more still when it's someone who has a connection to earth magic."  He hesitated for a moment, knowing that Ron didn't know about their ability to generate a lot of magical energy together when they had sex.  It was something James meant to explain to him later, when they were in secure surroundings, but Harry couldn't afford to wait that long.  "Look, remember when you stayed with us last summer?  You and me - we rub sparks off each other somehow.  I don't know why.  But every time we shagged we were chucking out enough magic to power the wards - Dad told me after you left.  And there were a _lot_ of wards around us there, you've no idea."

Ron gave him an odd look.  "Is that normal?"

Harry shrugged.  "Don't ask me, I don't know how it happens.  But I reckon it's pretty unusual.  It's one of the reasons why Dad and the others were keen for you to come with us.  Normally we spend ages at every new site setting up these high-strength wards and finding safe sources of power to keep them going, but with you and me there together we wouldn't have to do that."

"Is that why you want to do this with me?"  Now Ron's expression was wary.

Harry smiled at him.  "I want to do it with you anyway.  But if I don't do the rite with you, then I'll probably have to do it with Rowen or Nancy - or even Gwyn.  And that's not happening, mate, you know that.  We don't share."

"I wondered what'd happen if I said no," Ron muttered, not looking at Harry, and he kicked aimlessly at a pile of fallen twigs in the grass.

"Look, you don't have to," Harry said in a quieter tone.  "Gwyn's right - it's not something to do without knowing what you're getting yourself into.  The Great Rites are … intense.  It sounds like a weird thing to say, but you won't be the same person afterwards.  You'll see stuff, experience stuff … things that you can't put into words or make sense of on a normal day.  And you'll do things you wouldn't normally do because the rite makes it the only sensible thing to do.  Things you might be unwilling to do normally."

"Are you trying to put me off?  Because you won't do it," Ron said.  There were stubborn lines around his mouth and his eyes challenged Harry.  "Maybe I don't own you, Potter, but I'm buggered if I'll sit around tonight while you shag someone else under a tree in the middle of a field!"

"You should let me talk you through the whole thing before you say something like that," Harry warned him, but he was warmed by Ron's response.

"Go on then - talk.  But I'm warning you, I'm not backing out.  You do this thing with me or it doesn't get done."

"All right."  Harry took a deep breath and hoped Ron wouldn't regret saying that.  "This is what happens …"

 

~~~

 

The coven gathered at dusk in the entrance hall, which had been cleared of furnishings and thoroughly cleaned with small brooms made of herbs.  They had all fasted since midmorning and bathed shortly before gathering, changing into loose garments made of plain linen simply dyed and with only minimal decoration.

_No complicated fastenings_ , Harry had told Ron.  _No buttons or toggles or zips.  Tie fastenings only._

Ron glanced around surreptitiously as the group made a loose circle around Gwyn.  He and Harry wore the simplest clothes - sleeveless linen robes made out of single lengths of cloth dyed a subtle green shade.  Rowen and Joe wore loose trousers and went bare-chested; Gwyn also wore trousers, with a tunic that had short sleeves and some embroidery.  Susan and Hermione wore ankle-length dresses formed by wrapping a long length of cloth around themselves and belting it with very simple braided cords.  Nancy, however, wore only a floor length wrap-around skirt; her torso was bare, revealing a set of elaborate ivy leaf tattoos that twined around her arms from just above the wrist, up over her shoulders and down to curve around her breasts.  Ron noticed that Rowen and Gwyn also had similar tattoos on their forearms, although none of the others did; he wondered if they were permanent or something they'd done just for this rite.  Those of the coven with long hair had untied it to hang loose about their shoulders.

_The high-priest or priestess makes a blessing_ , Harry's voice whispered in his mind.

Gwyn stepped forward into the circle.  He was holding a long, oddly-shaped wooden rod known as a _stang_ \- it was made of beech-wood, nearly six feet in length, and forked at the top to represent Herne's antlers.  It was dark with age and carved all over with runes that made Ron's eyes feel funny when he tried to look at it directly, and the foot of it was shod in iron.  When Gwyn spoke, it wasn't in English at all -

_Some priests and priestesses prefer to speak in one of the elder tongues - Welsh or Gaelic or Saxon, even Cornish.  Gwyn's probably one of that sort, the priests of Herne usually are._

Ron did as Harry had advised and simply let the words wash over him, letting the others make the responses at the appropriate moments.  Nancy and Rowen acted as Gwyn's helpers; at one point Rowen brushed them lightly from head to foot with a small cinnamon-scented besom, while at another their robes were taken from them while Nancy daubed runes on their hands, throats and bellies from a bowl of a dark reddish paint.  Ron was grateful that no one was standing behind him at this point and the birthmark on his back went unseen in the low light of the hall.

Then their robes were returned to them and Nancy left the hall for a moment, returning with a large silver goblet full of a clear potion.  The goblet was ornate, clearly a ceremonial object; on one side was the face of a bearded man while on the other was the head of a stag, and the handles on each side were formed out of their elaborate antlers.

Ron watched warily as Gwyn made a blessing over the goblet.  He took it from Nancy with a formal kiss on her mouth and turned to Harry and Ron, raising the goblet in tribute to them before taking a single deep swallow of the potion.  Then he turned back to Nancy and held the goblet so that she too could drink from it.  Nancy passed the goblet to Rowen - again with a formal kiss on the mouth - and he drank.  Rowen passed it to Hermione in the same way, Hermione to Joe, Joe to Susan, until Susan had taken her mouthful and passed it back to Gwyn with a kiss.  Gwyn turned back to Ron and Harry.

_The potion's the part that makes the Great Rites different from the other sabbats and esbats_.  _It's dangerous stuff if you don't know what you're getting into.  It's part stimulant, part aphrodisiac, and it makes you have waking dreams.  Only the Huntress and King Stag drink a full draught - the rest of the coven take just enough to help them focus their magic into the rite, and the kids and elders don't drink it at all.  Everyone in the circle takes a mouthful, then the main participants drink the rest of it between them.  And from that point you're not really in control - the spirit of the rite takes over and you do what it wants you to do, guided by the priestess or priest._

Gwyn held the goblet up to Ron's lips.  "Drink," he commanded, his eyes intense.

Ron drank; it was bitter-tasting stuff, with a heavy undertaste like strong spirits that seemed to flow gently into his body like the warmth of a fire.  By the time Gwyn took the goblet back Ron could already feel a disconnection from his surroundings.  All his senses were more intense: he was hyper-aware of the waxed wooden floorboards under his bare feet and the coolness of the thin linen robe he wore; there was heat from the fireplace, the candle lamps and the bodies of the others, and a sharp smell of cinnamon and bruised leaves.  He could smell the musk of his own body and of Harry next to him.  The runes on Gwyn's stang, currently held by Rowen, were alight with fire running up and down the length of the staff and the tattoos on Nancy's body moved, twining about her like living plants.

And the room was filled with patterns of light that couldn't possibly come from the tiny candle-bowls placed around the room.  Earlier in the day they had all worked to remove the furnishings from the hall, including the wall hangings and rugs on the floor, leaving it bare floorboard, plaster walls and rafters.  Now Ron watched, distantly fascinated, as cracks appeared on the walls and between the floorboards and little glowing tendrils of light slipped through them, thickening and growing stronger until he could see that they were shoots of ivy with its pointed, heart-shaped leaves.  They crept across the floor, spread out over the walls, and slipped over and around the rafters to drop shining green festoons about the coven and send long ropes snaking over their feet.   Then patterns began to form in the woodwork, turning it from smooth beams and boards fashioned by a master carpenter back to rough-barked branches with twigs and leaves.  Faces bulged out of the plaster on the walls and in the rough stonework around the fireplace, the masks of animals and humans and creatures that were neither one nor the other; eyes blinked, lips smiled and grinned and leered, and here and there canine teeth flashed and long ears twitched.

Harry had finished drinking from the goblet and Gwyn passed it back to Nancy, who put it on one of the hearthstones; Ron watched curiously as a pair of gnarled stone hands twisted up out of the stone to hold it.  Then the birthmark on his back itched furiously and he tried to twist an arm behind himself to scratch it.  Harry reached out to stop him, holding his hand loosely, and Ron was distracted again, this time by the heat in Harry's palm and the smell of him.  He could feel his lover's pulse like a drumbeat through his skin and bones.

Harry was naked.  That was odd; Ron hadn't seen him take his robe off.  Then he saw that they were _all_ naked and that was stranger still, for he couldn't see their clothes anywhere and yet none of them had left the room.  Curiously, the fact that they were all naked was of little interest to him - if questioned, he wouldn't have been able to say what any of the others looked like, although at any other time he would have had the normal young male's interest in what everyone did or did not possess physically.  He was, however, very aware of Harry, who was radiating heat like a kitchen stove and smelled of musk and cinnamon and something else that was entirely him and called to Ron like a siren.

Gwyn was speaking again, words which made no sense to Ron but which had a poetic, rhythmic lilt to them.  The rest of the coven joined in with the chant as the high priest stepped forward to touch the stang to Ron and Harry's foreheads and Ron noticed - again, almost in passing and without any sense of surprise or alarm - that the gaps in their circle left by those members who weren't present in the house that night were now filled by two more women, one in her late thirties and the other a teenager, and three men, one nearly as old as Gwyn and the other two somewhere around Rowen's age.  He concluded that these must be the other coven members after all, and it didn't seem at all odd to him that they should somehow be there now when they were physically somewhere else.

The coven knelt, still chanting; all but Gwyn who gestured gravely to Harry and Ron and turned to lead them out of the door.

The three of them walked out of the house and through the orchard, down the lane and across the meadow to the Master Oak.  The fact that they were naked and barefoot and there was a hard frost settling over the countryside was unimportant - in fact, Ron had rarely felt warmer and more comfortable in his own skin.  His attention was more completely held by the way every living thing - every plant, every bush, every tree and blade of grass - gleamed and luminesced in the darkness, as though lit by tiny internal fires; the land around him was _alight,_ rippling and burgeoning, and none more so than the oak itself which glowed with an emerald green inner fire and stood out among the other trees like a beacon in the landscape.

He could see the wards around it.  That was interesting; they were bands and curtains of multicoloured light rippling across the ground and hanging in the air, some following the line of a thin stream of magic that flowed by the oak perhaps twelve feet away, barricading it off, and others providing a semi-opaque wall around the tree.  The power fizzed as they approached the oak, making his birthmark prickle and itch.

Gwyn stopped short of the ward surrounding the tree and bowed to them gravely.  Harry bowed back, and Ron followed his lead, then Harry took hold of his wrist again and stepped through the ward.

What happened next was perhaps the oddest moment for Ron, although it wouldn't seem so until much later.

He felt the ward passing over his skin like a cold spray of water, felt the heat of Harry's hand around his wrist, and was intrigued by the early summer warmth inside the ward, the smells of blooming flowers and dry grass and the warm air around him.  No hint of the frosty air and ground remained; it was like a warm summer night and before them was the hut of green boughs the coven had erected earlier for them.

He was standing outside the ward, watching curiously as Harry led him inside the curtain of magic.  Gwyn waited until the ward enclosed them, then turned and walked back down the track to the house.  Ron watched him go, fascinated to see a kind of double image of the man - one very ordinary and human, dressed in plain linen garments with tattoos up his forearms and walking with the stang in his hand, and the other a muscular naked man with oak leaves for hair and antlers growing out of his head and holding a great longbow in one hand.

He turned back to look through the ward around the oak tree and saw that he and Harry both still wore their linen robes.  As he watched, the two of them shed the garments and Harry pushed Ron back against the solid trunk of the tree, pressing his lips to his throat.

Fingers touched Ron's elbow and he turned away again from what was happening by the tree to find himself looking into Harry's eyes.

_See?_ Harry said and gestured to them.  Ron saw the almost painfully bright emerald glow inside Harry's skin and when he looked down at himself there was a corresponding coppery-gold light inside himself. 

_It's not about sex at all,_ Harry told him.  Then he pointed over Ron's shoulder to the oak tree.  _Look._

High above the heads of their other selves was the spot near to the amputated branch where the iron spike still violated the integrity of the tree.  Seen like this, through the patterns of the tree's own inner magic, the spike and the poison it carried clearly showed as a dull, unhealthy knot in the otherwise clean flow of magic and life.

_Can we heal it?_ Ron asked.  The detachment of the rite removed any anxieties he might otherwise have felt.

Harry's eyes were bright and steady.  _Yes._

**End Part 3**


	4. Chapter 4

**Part 4**

"It boggles my mind," James remarked rather grumpily.  "I lose track of them for a couple of hours and they start randomly performing Great Rites all over the place."

"It was a little more than a couple of hours," Lily commented.  "Light that range for me, please?  Besides, they weren't _randomly_ performing anything - anyone would have done the same thing in their place."

"I could refute that argument, you know.  _Anyone_ wouldn't."

"Don't be pedantic.  And you're only complaining because they did it without asking _your_ permission first … James, are you going to light that range?  My hands are full!"

"You make me sound like an insufferable autocrat!"  But he lit the range, albeit with some difficulty; Nancy's stove was a little different to the ones he'd encountered before.

"That's because you are," Lily told him, amused.  She reached around him and set a big copper kettle on the hob.  "There is a reason why you wear the antlers in this relationship!"

"Funny how I always seem to be the one taking the orders, then," he grumbled.

"It does you good," she told him.  James snorted.

"I didn't expect to arrive here to find most of the coven flaked out and our two missing," he said.

She relented.  "Neither did I, and it really is a bit of luck that one of the other members arrived home at the same time as us, or we'd have been stuck outside the wards until someone recovered enough to let us in."  She opened and closed a series of cupboards until she found a tub of tea and began to measure spoonfuls into a large teapot.  "It doesn't help that it's barely dawn yet - we'll all feel better for some tea and toast.  Did you see any mugs anywhere?  And milk?  Having to nip out and milk a cow or goat will be a pain."

"You're off the hook - their milk seems to come in glass bottles."  James took one off the cold shelf of the pantry and put it on the table.

Remus appeared in the kitchen doorway.  "Need a hand?"

"Yes," Lily said at once.  She flicked her wand at the pantry and a large loaf of bread sailed out to land on a bread board at one end of the kitchen table.  "Cut some bread and start toasting it, please.  How are they doing in there?"

Remus found a bread knife and began slicing the loaf, while James hunted for mugs and a toasting fork.  "They're all still a bit out of it, but that chap Matthew says it's the potion they drank for the rite," he said.

"The Cup of Life," Lily said and she made a face.  "I wonder which variant they use?  I'd expect it to affect the principal participants but not everyone else, not like this.  I'd better make a pot of mint tea as well, just in case.  Goodness knows what state Ron and Harry will be in, but perhaps the rite will have burned off most of it."

"If they're not back at the house in half an hour, I'm going looking for them," James said.  He herded a small flock of mugs to the table with his wand and opened a cutlery drawer.  "Here's the toasting fork, Moony."

"Good."  Remus raised his voice slightly, calling over his shoulder: "Sirius!  Come and make some toast."

"I wonder if there's any honey," Lily commented, going back to the pantry.  "That's always good for instant energy … oh!  They must like honey, there's pots and pots of it in here."

"They have beehives," Sirius said, as she walked out of the pantry.  He was impaling a slice of bread on the toasting fork.  "Matthew was just telling me.  They make a bit of money on honey and orchard fruit, and they're considering setting up a cider press."

"How many hives do they have?" James asked, surprised.

"Nine, and they're hoping to increase the number this year."

Lily frowned, thinking - as her son had - of the traditional association between bees and the Mother Goddess.  "This is a very odd coven," she remarked.

"Why?" Sirius asked, suspiciously bland.  "Because half of them are gay?"

"It's not a matter of them being gay, it's a matter of balance."

The corner of James's mouth twitched.  "They seemed to be doing fine until someone damaged their oak tree."

"Perhaps if they had a proper balance of energies they could have healed it themselves."

"And perhaps if Maevi could bring herself to hand the reins over to someone younger, half of Running Hare Coven wouldn't be talking about setting up a new hearth elsewhere."

"Maevi's a very capable leader," Lily muttered, setting the honey jar down on the table.  "And I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"I'm making a point," James said.  "As in - there's no point in going on about the balances in this coven, when Maevi is throwing out the balances in _your_ coven."  He tried to hide a grin at Lily's frown, but didn't succeed very well as usual.  "There's nothing to stop her taking the elder wise-woman role, but she won't do it because she likes being in charge too much.  A coven's all about the people in it, you've said it yourself often enough!"

Lily had no comment to make about this, so instead she made the two pots of tea and floated them out into the main hall where the coven members were nursing their potion-hangovers.  Sirius and Remus had moved some of the usual furniture back into the hall with the help of Matthew, the member who had met them outside the wards earlier, and everyone was sitting - or rather sagging - around the table.  James sent the mugs, honey and milk in and Sirius began to stack toast on a large plate.

They were just starting to get mugs of tea into the hands of the sufferers when the front door opened and Harry and Ron, wrapped in wet and mud-smeared linen robes, staggered inside, propping each other up and looking half-frozen and thoroughly exhausted.  Lily hurried to find blankets to wrap around them and make them comfortable by the fire, while James poured them mugs of tea.  Neither of them seemed entirely aware of their surroundings, but Ron roused a little when James tried to wrap Harry's hand around his mug.

"He's got a cut on his hand," he said.

At this Nancy pulled herself together enough to get up and help Lily find ointment and bandages.  They were cleaning the jagged, lightning-shaped wound on Harry's palm when Gwyn made his way over to speak to the two boys.

"The oak?" he asked hopefully.

Ron mutely held out the iron spike that had caused all the trouble.

"It's all right now," Harry said.  He drooped visibly.  "I really want to sleep."

"Then sleep you must," Lily said firmly.

 

~~~

 

Ron awoke with the worst hangover he'd ever experienced - which, as he was only nineteen, wasn't saying much, but he was still fairly sure it would be fatal.  For two Knuts he would have gone back to sleep, but his bladder was screaming and he had no choice but to crawl out of bed unless he wanted to have a very embarrassing accident.

He crawled down the passage too, as he couldn't quite work out how to get himself upright and wasn't sure if it would be wise to do so anyway.  The floor tiles in the bathroom were reassuringly smooth under his hands and knees and the porcelain of the toilet bowl very cool.  Getting himself to his feet to piss took a hundred years and had to be done with his eyes closed to stop the room swirling around him.  He ended up sitting down to do it; he didn't trust his balance enough to stand for the duration.

But flushing the toilet afterwards was his biggest mistake.  The roar of the cistern set off an avalanche of rocks in his head and when he tried to jerk away from the noise, the room swung like a crazed hammock and his stomach turned over ominously.  Fortunately, the toilet bowl was still to hand and he vomited into it gratefully.

When the paroxysm had passed, someone wiped his face with a damp cloth and put a glass to his lips.  "Take a sip … and another …"

Ron did as he was told and gagged again when the potion met his tastebuds.

"Try to keep it down, son, it'll help."

Nothing that tasted as bad as that could possibly help.  He did as he was told, however, and after a moment or two the nausea slackened, and he became aware that the person standing next to him was holding the damp cloth to his forehead and rubbing his back soothingly.  He wanted to weep with gratitude.

"Die now?" he mumbled.

His rescuer chuckled.  "Harry wants to skip death and just be buried alive!"

This seemed like a viable plan to Ron.  "Yes?" he said hopefully.

"No.  More potion and back to bed."

Not having much choice in the matter, he did as he was told.

When he next awoke his head was mostly clear, his stomach was noisily pointing out that he hadn't eaten in at least a day, and Harry was missing from the other side of the bed.  It was also clearly approaching evening again.  Ron got up and discovered to his horror that not only was he naked but he was also still filthy from the previous night's adventure.  A hot shower improved his outlook immensely, although he was disconcerted to look in the bathroom mirror and find himself with what would normally be a month's growth of beard.  Was this a consequence of the rite?  If so, it was an odd sort of side-effect.  He shaved it off, not entirely without regret, and noting as he did so that there were a few dark whiskers in the washbasin which suggested Harry had had the same problem.

Clean and dressed, he went downstairs.  The main hall was bustling as the long dinner table was set and there were more people around than he remembered.  Then he was spotted and a ragged cheer set up.  Ron froze for a moment, suspecting mockery, but he was grabbed by Susan and Joe and his back was patted heartily by everyone who could reach - which included, to his surprise, Harry's father and uncles.  Then Gwyn appeared, beaming, and Harry popped up too, grinning at him.

All things considered, Ron was a little surprised himself by the first question out of his mouth: "How's the tree?"

It was rather embarrassing to see just how grateful Gwyn was.

"The oak is healed, Herne be praised," he told Ron.  "There's barely a scar in the bark where the spike was and your arithmancer here - " he nodded to Peter who was standing on the edge of the group, looking interested, "he tells me the poisons are gone from the main trunk.  There might be some loss of minor twigs and leaves over the summer, but nothing of account.  And the wound where we removed the branch might have been made years ago."

"The mistletoe seems to have recovered too," James added.  "Really a very good night's work."

"How's your head now?" Nancy asked him.

"Not so bad, thanks …"

"You're just saying that 'cause you don't want to drink any more potions," Harry teased him.  He reached out and brushed his knuckles over Ron's jaw.  "You shaved it off!  You had a brilliant beard when I woke up."

Ron rubbed his chin self-consciously.  "Did you?"

Harry sniggered.  "Yeah, it looked really stupid!"

Ron grinned.

"Your hair's longer as well," Susan added.

"Great.  Mum'll hit me with a Barber Charm the minute I walk through the door."

"You don't live with your mother anymore," Lily told him with a smile.  "You can do what you like with your hair."  She tweaked a lock in the nape of his neck.

"Tell Mum that," Ron said ruefully.

"I hope you're hungry now," Nancy told him, and she was smiling too.  "Dinner's ready."

That was good to hear.  "I could eat the table …"

It was the first time Ron had tasted rabbit or pigeon, but he was hungry enough not to be bothered by the idea of unfamiliar game meats.  He wasn't the only one with a hearty appetite; Harry was putting away his fair share as were most of the coven.

"It's the Cup of Life potion," Hermione told them distractedly; she was trying rather unsubtly to eavesdrop on the conversation at the other end of the table, where James and Lily had their heads together with Nancy, Gwyn and Rowen.  "It suppresses your appetite for a while, but when it comes back you want to eat everything in sight."

"Before or after you chuck up?" Ron asked her dryly.  He hadn't forgotten his first visit to the bathroom.

"It only makes you sick if you drink a lot of it, like any alcoholic drink.  It's made with mead."

"Of course, you have to drink a lot of it to be in a proper trance state for the Great Rite," Joe added, "which is a problem."  He grinned at them.

"I've never really wanted to take part in a Great Rite," Sirius commented amiably, helping himself to more bread, "which is odd really, because getting whacked out on dodgy potions and having tonnes of sex sounds like a good deal, on the face of it."

Hermione frowned at him.  "It's not about sex or getting high," she said.

"And that's the problem right there," Sirius agreed.  "People take it so seriously."

"You're _supposed_ to take it seriously," Hermione said, annoyed.  "It's not something to be treated lightly, it's an important rite!"

"See?" Sirius said to Remus, who was sitting next to him.  "We've been doing it wrong.  You're not supposed to have fun when you have sex."

"Behave," Remus told him sternly.

Sirius winked at Ron.

"He's winding you up," Remus told Hermione, when she opened her mouth to argue with Sirius.  "Don't give him the satisfaction!"

She subsided, looking indignant.

Sirius pretended to look injured.  "I'm not a wind-up artist!"

"Not much," Ron said before he could stop himself, and Harry laughed at his uncle's surprise.

After the meal there were more than enough hands to help with clearing up, and Harry was able to separate Ron from the others and take him outside for a chat.

It was fully dark out there, but Ron had another handy spell he'd learned at the Pink Kneazle Wizards' Club, one that took the light made by a simple _lumos_ charm and converted it into a concentrated ball of light that could be directed to lead the way down a dark path.  "You need this sort of thing at the club, because it's only open at night and the lighting's a bit dim in parts of the building," he remarked.

"I reckon you did all right out of working at that place," Harry commented, as they strolled down one of the paths through the orchard.

"They were pretty good to me," Ron said.  "I didn't mind working there.  I mean - yeah, it was weird and I don't really get why people find that kind of thing a turn on, but," he shrugged, "it's their money and it's not like anyone working there was being forced to do stuff they didn't want to do.  I reckon Fuchsia enjoyed it a bit _too_ much, to be honest, but that's his business.  They paid me reasonable money to fix their stuff and I did the job, and everyone was happy.  I was a bit pissed off when Gran turned up and started chucking her weight around," he added, frowning at the remembered grievance.  "I love her and everything, but that's only the second time I saw her in years, and she goes and gets me sacked!"

"What really happened with the twins?" Harry asked.

Ron shrugged.  "I got fed up of being treated like a moron.  They pretty much left me to manage the shop single-handed between Christmas and New Year, which was hell because all the kids were coming in to stock up before they went back to Hogwarts.  Then one of their mouthy smart-arsed friends turned up and pissed me off.  We had a bit of a barney about it and I walked."

"I'm glad you did."

"Yeah.  Dunno why I stuck with 'em as long as I did, to be honest."

"Dad said we'll take off in the morning, fairly early," Harry said.  "When we get to wherever it is we're going, Dumbledore'll explain everything properly.  You'll get paid for working with us, by the way.  You won't get rich on it, but all your expenses are paid and you'll have a wage too."

"Who coughs for that?" Ron asked, interested.  He was privately a little relieved to hear that he'd get paid.  He wouldn't necessarily have walked out straightaway if it was unpaid, for being with Harry meant more to him, but everyone needed to eat, wear clothes and have a few Sickles to spend occasionally.

"There are people who back what we do - I don't know who they are, but Dumbledore's been working with them for years."

"Is it true he could have been Minister of Magic?"

Harry shrugged.  "Supposedly.  He was headmaster at Hogwarts for a few years too, but he handed over to McGonagall so he could concentrate on the Order."

"Order?"

"The Order of the Phoenix.  It'll all be explained."

Ron accepted this.  He could have argued, but he was still quite tired from the previous night's activities.

After a minute or two of silence, Harry suddenly nudged up against his side and insinuated himself under Ron's left arm.  He tucked an arm around his waist and after a moment of surprise, Ron slung his arm around Harry's shoulders.

"Are you okay?" Harry asked him earnestly.

"Yeah, of course.  Why wouldn't I be?"

"Well, you know - the weird stuff last night.  It was pretty odd, even for me.  That potion was stronger than I'm used to."

Ron considered the matter for a few moments.  True, there had been all the visions, the sense of being in two places at once, more sex than he would have believed himself capable of even in his most braggardly moments, and the actual healing of the tree which he still couldn't entirely get his head around.  And the hangover, of course, which was a good argument never to participate in a Great Rite ever again.

"You don't have to talk about it," Harry added.

"Not sure there's a lot to say really," Ron said.

"Probably not.  Does it bother you, though?"

"What do you mean?"

"You usually top," Harry said dryly.

"Oh!"  That was one of the things he would have preferred not to talk about, especially his own disturbing willingness to go along with it at the time.  "Well … don't get used to it, all right?" he said, trying to make it sound jokey.  "I'm the boss here."  Harry pinched him in a sensitive spot, making him yelp.  "Hey!"

"Don't argue with the Young Stag!"

"Excuse _me_ , Your Horniness!"

Harry laughed and pulled Ron to halt, dragging him around to face him and pulling his head down so that he could kiss him, hard.

"Come on, we'd better get back up to the house."

 

~~~

 

Ron suspected that had it not been for their hangovers, the Green Lord Coven would have thrown a party that night to celebrate the healing of their Holy Oak.  They still managed to be very convivial that evening, albeit without the assistance of alcohol, and he got the impression that when the missing members returned home there would be a party anyway.

This was confirmed early the following morning when Gwyn and Nancy insisted that they must all return - all of them, although Harry and Ron especially - for the next Sabbat, when there would be a proper celebration of the coven's good fortune.  Nancy went one step further than that; while Gwyn was talking to James and the others, she took Ron and Harry to one side and told them that the coven would welcome their return at any time, both as visitors and as members of the house if they wished.

Ron let Harry do the talking in response to this, expressing their pleasure without making any firm promises, but he was rather gratified.  He liked the coven and felt comfortable there.  It would be disappointing not to return sometime ... although he made a mental vow never to be talked into participating in a Great Rite again, or not as a main participant at any rate.

Eventually they all gathered up their packs and broomsticks, and Harry took his owl Hedwig to the end of the pathway to send her off ahead of them.  Only Gwyn and Nancy had got up to see their visitors off in the chilly dawn, but since it was clear that they were expected to return at some point there was no disappointment that Rowen and the others weren't there.

"Well ... fair travels and blessings bright upon you all," Nancy said, clasping their hands in turn and exchanging kisses on the cheek with Lily.  She kissed Ron and Harry too, smiling warmly at them.

"Herne go with you all," Gwyn said, clasping hands with each of them.  "May he bless the work you do and grant you all come safely back here soon."

"Ron, you're with me," Sirius said, and Peter gestured to Harry.

The last thing Ron saw before they Apparated was Nancy and Gwyn raising their hands in farewell; his raised his own in response as he took hold of Sirius's arm, and felt the familiar unpleasant sensation of Apparition.

The House of the Green Lord vanished.

 **End Part 4**


	5. Chapter 5

**Part 5**

Ron was inclined to be wary of Sirius simply because the man frequently reminded him of the twins, but it was as difficult to wholly dislike him as it was to dislike James. 

When they arrived at their destination - alone and in the middle of nowhere, which was no longer a surprise - they had a short walk through some woods, during which Sirius sketchily outlined what had happened to the rest of the group when they lost Harry and Ron (they had arrived at an unspecified location, discovered Ron and Harry were missing and attempted to backtrack, picking up Lily in the process).  Interestingly, they hadn't found the White Mare Coven either and Lily had confirmed that she didn't know of such a place.  This (according to Sirius) was proof that James was a prat in need of an ear trumpet.

What Ron thought was that James could be annoying, but on this occasion he felt a certain sympathy for him.  After all, "Green Lord Coven" was different enough from "White Mare Coven" to make a genuine mistake on James's part unlikely.  And according to Sirius they'd ended up at another sort of coven entirely, called the Stone Spear ("Not a coven at all, really," he explained.  "An Asatru _garth_ \- they're Odinists ...") which wasn't exactly a name that could have been mistaken for the other either.  Had it been him and the directions had come from this Dumbledore bloke as Harry had indicated, then he would be wanting to ask some rather stiff questions of the old man.  What was the point in sending everyone around in circles?

In the meantime Sirius had located a small and ramshackle barn in the corner of an overgrown field; the building was barely visible under the vast overgrowth of brambles, ivy and other scrub that had grown out of the hedge and bank behind it over the years.  Nevertheless, there was a pair of well-hidden doors which he unlocked with a tap of his wand and opened, and another muttered charm produced enough light that Ron felt safe to enter without fear of spiders and other creepy-crawlies dropping on him unexpectedly.

The interior of the 'barn' was completely different and Ron looked around with great interest.  It was bigger inside than it was outside, and this was at least partly accounted for by the fact that they had to go down a flight of steps to reach the main floor area below.  Sirius closed the doors behind them and locked them, gesturing for Ron to look around.

"This is one of our emergency storage areas," he explained, "and if we have to, we can sack out here for a day or two.  It's well warded and we keep some of our equipment here.  Don't be fooled by the height of the stairs - the room below is completely underground."

Ron followed him downstairs and looked around.  "Whose is the motorbike?" he asked, admiring its sleek lines.  It was stored to one side of the main room, along with a sidecar, leaving a broad space in the middle of the room which probably had many diverse uses.  There was a single door on the left-hand wall, and in a corner were stacked bundles of canvas and netting which looked like camping equipment.  There was a broom-rack with a couple of spare brooms, stacks of things like lamps, cooking pots, a folding table and collapsible cauldrons, and a big corkboard on one wall that was currently bare of anything but a cluster of map pins in one corner.  There was another pair of double doors opposite the stairs and a trapdoor in the floor.

"It's mine," Sirius replied.  "Bought it the year I left school, and it's been worth its weight in Galleons ever since.  The sidecar has an internal engorgement charm on it.  Here - help me pack a couple of these tents into it.  We're probably going to need the good ones instead of those crap Muggle contraptions we've been using."

Ron quickly put his knapsack and broom down and helped Sirius to select three new tents from the pile in the corner.  The sidecar didn't look as though it could hold more than one of them but true to Sirius's word, all three were stowed with room to spare, which they used to pack the rest of their baggage and Ron's broom.  Sirius's broom went onto the rack on the wall.

"I won't be needing it with the bike," he said briskly.  "Now - this is the risky part.  Those doors there open into a tunnel which leads out onto the road.  I don't want to start the bike in here just in case we attract attention, so if I push it out can you manage the sidecar?  You'll need to douse the lights and secure the doors here behind you, because the tunnel's not big enough for me to squeeze around you to do it."

"Any special locking charm?" Ron asked.

"It's pre-set - just tap the lock with your wand."

"Okay."

"Great.  Let's go ..."

It was pretty dark in the tunnel.  Ron waited long enough that the light filtering through from the room gave Sirius a good start, then he manoeuvred the sidecar out and turned back.  _"Nox,"_ he said, flicking his wand at the lamp in the ceiling.  The light went out, plunging him into near-stygian darkness.  _"Lumos,"_ he murmured, and his wand lit up enough for him to see to close the doors and lock them.

Pushing the sidecar out was difficult for the floor of the tunnel was uneven and the wheels inclined to slip on it.  Ron cursed them amiably but eventually made it to the mouth of the tunnel where real daylight - for it was now true morning - filtered through more wildly overgrown vegetation that covered the mouth of the tunnel.

"We're okay," Sirius said softly, where he waited in the entrance.  "Let's not hang around though."

They attached the sidecar to the bike and pushed it carefully out to the side of a badly maintained Muggle lane.  Then Sirius handed Ron a crash helmet.  "Put this on and hop on behind me ..."

Ron did as he was told, excited in spite of himself.  He'd never ridden a motorbike before.  Sirius swung a leg over the seat and settled himself, then pointed out the rear foot-pedals so that Ron knew where to seat himself, and Ron scrambled on behind him.

"Okay, hang on tight!"

The bike roared into life.

 

~~~

 

Their journey took perhaps four hours and Ron enjoyed every minute of it, especially when they stopped to buy breakfast from a village shop and Sirius casually told him that the bike could also fly.  This, in his opinion, had been the only drawback to it and he pestered Harry's godfather with questions about how the charms worked until they had to saddle up and return to the road.

They were riding along the coast for much of the trip, so it came as no surprise when around midday they finally took a turning off the main road and followed a series of lanes that eventually emerged out of a stand of trees onto the side of a small cliff facing out to sea.  What did make Ron blink in surprise was seeing the little folly that had been in the clearing the day he joined Harry and the others.  It was perched on the side of the cliff in a small grassy space surrounded by rocks and while it looked marginally less out of place there than in the woods, it was still a fairly improbable structure.

He knew better than to ask how it had got there, of course.

They rode up to the building and followed the track around to the rear of it, and as Sirius slowly brought the bike to a halt a door in the folly opened and Peter stepped out.  Sirius shut off the engine and took his helmet off.

"Well?  Is he here this time?"

Peter nodded.  "Oh yes - everyone's here except you two.  You can leave the bike out - there's a perimeter ward that reaches halfway back up the lane."

"Right-oh.  Come on, Ron ..."

Leaving their helmets and packs with the bike and sidecar, Ron and Sirius followed Peter inside.

The first thing Ron noticed as they stepped through the door was that the folly was significantly larger inside than it seemed from the outside.  No one who attended Hogwarts would be particularly surprised by this, but Ron did find it rather odd to find himself inside a building that from the inside looked remarkably like a cross between a rather esoteric library and a cathedral, while on the outside it was perched on the side of a cliff in the middle of nowhere.

The floor and walls were stone, but this tended to escape notice because he was looking instead at all the shelves around the curved walls that were piled high with books, and all the little tables and cabinets full of knickknacks and oddities.  In the few free spaces on the walls and floor there were rugs patterned with constellations, charts of the Thaumaturgical Table, or paintings of people in old-fashioned clothes holding skulls and looking sceptical.

There were also things hanging from the ceiling and Ron was staring at the fossilised skeleton of some strange flying creature just above his head when a voice said, "Good afternoon, Mr. Weasley."

He started and looked around.  In the midst of all this clutter was a number of armchairs, none of which matched each other or went with the rest of the furniture, and seated on the chairs were Harry, his parents and uncles, and another man, very thin and bearded and old, who was regarding him over the top of his half-moon spectacles with twinkling blue eyes.

"Perhaps when we've finished here, you would like to take a closer look at Gnashes?  He is a most curious creature.  In the meantime, please - find a seat and have a cup of tea.  You and Sirius must be thirsty after your journey."

There was just enough space on a dainty little sofa next to Harry, so Ron picked his way over to it (feeling as awkward as a giraffe in these surroundings) and sat down uneasily.  A fine china cup and saucer drifted into the air.

"Milk?" their host asked solicitously.  "Sugar?  One lump or two?"

"Er - two please."

There were a couple of plops inside the cup and it floated across to him; Ron took hold of it carefully, made nervous by the fine fluting of the china.  The teaspoon resting in the saucer was so dainty that the handle looked like a needle.  Meanwhile the teapot poured another cup.

"Sirius?  Milk and one lump, as usual?"

"Please."  Sirius stripped his cloak off and found a seat on a stool close to Remus.  "Has anyone introduced ...?  Of course not.  Dumbledore, this is Harry's friend Ronald Weasley.  Ron, this is Albus Dumbledore - former professor, former headmaster, former Chief Warlock, former head of the International Confederation of Wizards, researcher, innovator, etcetera etcetera."

Dumbledore's twinkle became more pronounced.  "Biscuits?" he offered, and a dish began to circulate.  "My dear Sirius, what a litany.  But you left out my most treasured title!"

"Dissident," Remus supplied, smiling sardonically.

"You flatter me," Dumbledore told him.  "I prefer 'troublemaker' myself - it lends me an air of raffishness that I haven't legitimately been able to claim in many years."

"And you left out the most important of all," Lily put in.  "Head of the Order of the Phoenix."

"Former," Dumbledore corrected her, raising a finger.  "The Order stood down after the war, you know, and has never been recalled.  It's most important that the distinction is made, my dear, for the sake of those of our former comrades who now lead blameless lives - we wouldn't want the Ministry to think that the Order was still in existence.  They might feel the need to monitor those former members as well as us, making their lives unnecessarily uncomfortable.  Besides, our work is very different to that of the Order."

"Only inasmuch as we're cleaning up after the Death Eaters these days, rather than fighting them," James objected.  "And since we're still tracking the ones who got away ... amongst other things ..."

"I should be happy to argue the semantics with you later, James," Dumbledore said, smiling gently, "but our young friend has surely waited long enough for explanations - ah, no you don't, sir!  Manners, if you please!"

Ron started and nearly dropped his teacup.  Something large and golden had appeared abruptly in his peripheral vision ... and was trying to snatch the biscuit from his left hand.  It was a bird.  It was huge and magnificent in its gold and crimson plumage, and it was balancing on the leaf of a large potted plant by Ron's elbow as though it weighed no more than a feather.  Beady eyes fixed on Ron and it made a curious muted trill in its throat.

"That's Fawkes," Harry said, and he grinned at Ron's flummoxed expression.  "He likes custard creams."

"He really has the most shocking manners," Dumbledore said, shaking his head reprovingly.  "At the very least you could ask nicely, sir!"

"Is - is he a _phoenix?_ " Ron asked, stunned.

"Yes indeed, and a very spoilt one too."

Fawkes raised his crest and made another enquiring sound, bobbing his head and peering at Ron.  Not quite sure that he could believe this, Ron gingerly held out the biscuit and equally gravely Fawkes reached out and took it very gently in a claw.  Ron noticed that his talons were long and black as obsidian glass, as was his beak.  Fawkes let out a low warbling cry, then bent to pick neat little pieces off the biscuit.

Everyone was looking at Ron.  "What?" he asked, unnerved.

Dumbledore beamed.  "Fawkes has taken a fancy to you, Mr. Weasley!  I should tell you that he's an excellent judge of character and doesn't take to everyone."

Confused, Ron took a sip of his tea.  The nibbling noises Fawkes was making reminded him of Granny Weasley's parrot, Pontius, when he was eating sunflower seeds.  Fawkes was neater, though; Pontius scattered seed hulls everywhere, but not a single biscuit crumb fell to the floor.

"Well, that's always good to know," James remarked cryptically.  "Shall we get started, Professor?"

"Yes, of course - quite right."  Dumbledore set his cup on a little table at his side and sat forward in his chair, his hands on his knees.  He had a look of anticipation on his face.  "Firstly, Harry and Ronald, please tell me about the past couple of days.  You found your way to the coven?"

"Yes, sir," Harry said, when Ron was reluctant to reply.

"And you discovered their problem with their Master Oak?  Tell me, were the two of you able to help them?"

Harry shot a quick glance at Ron.  "Yes - that is, we managed to heal the damage."

"But you did this together?"

"Yes … we sort of adapted one of the Great Rites."

"And between the two of you, combining your magical strength, you successfully instructed the tree to heal itself, yes?"

James sat up.  "Dumbledore, did you send them to this Green Lord Coven deliberately?  Because you told us to head for some coven called White Mare which doesn't seem to exist, and when we got separated in the cloud - "

"Oh dear, did I?"  Dumbledore looked remorseful.  "My dear James, I do apologise.  I've discovered the occasional tendency to slur my words a little as I get older, which is most frustrating for people who think I've said one thing when in fact I meant something else entirely."

Ron found this rather hard to swallow; Dumbledore didn't seem very senile to him, despite his obvious age.  Apparently this was James's opinion and possibly everyone else's as well.  Then he saw Lily covering a smile with her hand, and both Peter and Remus trying to hide smirks.  When he looked sideways at him, Harry looked … interested.

Ron didn't blame James for looking rather annoyed, but it was more interesting to wonder why Dumbledore would have perpetrated the scam on him in the first place.  Had he wanted Harry and Ron to become separated from the others?  Clearly he had intended them to go to the Green Lord Coven all along, but what was so special about their Master Oak that it had merited sending them there?  If he and Harry could heal it, then presumably so could someone else.

Or perhaps they couldn't.  Harry _had_ mentioned that the two of them were good at raising power together, and there couldn't be all that many witches or wizards around who had been born as a result of Great Rites and thus with an earth magic connection like Harry's.

Dumbledore turned back to them.  "Did you have any problems raising sufficient power?"

"No, not at all."  Harry seemed a little bemused by the question.  "Actually, I was more worried that we'd raise too much and not be able to control it.  There was a ley-line quite close to the tree and Gwyn had to ward that, as well as putting barrier wards up in case we disturbed their beehives."

"You didn't call upon the ley-line for power?" he asked, his eyes sharp.

"No … why would we?  I was pretty sure before we started that we could raise plenty of power on our own.  Besides, it was a really weak ley-line."

"Excellent!"  And Dumbledore did look extremely pleased.  "Well!  That is certainly very helpful to know."

Harry exchanged a perplexed look with Ron (Ron was glad he wasn't the only one to be confused by Dumbledore's comment), but the others were moving on without them.

"Was this a test?" James was asking, sounding rather annoyed.

"It's helpful to take measure of what we're dealing with here, James," Dumbledore replied.  "It's one thing to have anecdotal evidence, but in our line of work you know we need more than that."  He sat back in his chair, propping his elbows on the arms and steepling his fingers before him.  His pale blue eyes fixed on Ron's face again with sharp intent.  "Now, Ronald - how much have you been told about our work and the purposes behind it?"

"Um … a bit," Ron said warily.  "I know you, um, clean ley-lines that got damaged during the war."

"Quite so.  Have you been told anything else?"

Ron shot a tiny glance at Harry, but his friend was scrounging another biscuit and didn't seem to see the look he gave him.

"They told me a bit about the Department of Mysteries."

"I see.  And you were told of the Death Eaters and their leader, yes?"

"Some, yeah."

"Since we're inside some very strong wards now, I can tell you his name," James said.  "He called himself Lord Voldemort."

For a moment Ron had the strangest sensation that he'd had a conversation - somewhere, with someone - and the name Voldemort had been mentioned.  Then it slipped away again, leaving only a strong sense of unease at the odd name.

"Voldemort?  What kind of name is that?"

"A made-up name," Peter said, speaking for the first time.  "Something he came up with to hide his true identity from everyone but his closest associates."

"Lord Voldemort's true name is Thomas Marvolo Riddle," Dumbledore said.  "Few people today would associate the man he later became with the boy who bore that name, however."

Ron's interest stirred.  "There's an award in the trophy room at Hogwarts, one of those things handed out for special services and stuff, with the name Riddle on it," he said.  "I saw it loads of times when Filch made me polish the silver as punishment.  Is that him?"

Dumbledore smiled.  "Yes, it is.  You're observant and have a good memory."

Ron shrugged.  "Got to, in Slytherin."

"You will find those to be useful qualities in life, especially in the work we do."  Dumbledore sighed a little.  "I would prefer not to go into a detailed history of who Tom Riddle was and what he did with his life - we can discuss that another time, if you are interested - but suffice it to say that for one reason or another he desired power and his means of attaining it were … unfortunate.  He played upon the insecurities and obsessions of certain sections of our society and in time amassed a significant number of followers who were willing to do almost anything to help him achieve his goals.  Fortunately an equally dedicated group of people were prepared to risk their lives in order to stop him and eventually he _was_ stopped - at great cost, but stopped nonetheless.  But the damage done in the process was significant and we are still, nearly twenty years later, repairing that damage.  Worse, there are … hints … that we may not have stopped him as decisively as we first believed."

"We've told Ron a little about the Department of Mysteries," James said.  "Not everything, of course."

"I see.  Have you told him what became of Lord Voldemort?"

"No - not that."

"If you caught him, doesn't that mean he's in Azkaban?" Ron asked, looking from one face to another warily.

"Little as I relish the notion of taking a human life, even one as corrupted as Tom Riddle's, I was not prepared to see him confined to a place where it would have been all too easy for a wizard of his talents to escape," Dumbledore replied.  "It was never our intention that he should be caught by the 'right and proper' authorities, which is why the final confrontation of the war was staged in the Department of Mysteries."

Ron glanced at Harry again; his friend was listening with great interest, but it was impossible to tell if any of this was news to him.

"So you killed him," he said, looking back at Dumbledore.

"Not … exactly."

Ron forced down a surge of annoyance at the roundabout way the information was being given to him.  "How do you not-exactly kill someone?" he asked, with a patience he didn't feel.  "Either he'd dead or he isn't."

"It would be nice if it was that simple," Sirius remarked.  He sounded like he meant the comment quite sincerely.

"Peter?" Dumbledore said softly.

Peter looked up.  He was actually sitting on the floor next to James's chair, with his knees drawn up and his arms around them like a small boy.  For once he wasn't fiddling with his casting bones.

"The Department of Mysteries existed to explore the hows and whys of magic," he told Ron.  "Questions like - what is magic and why do we have it but not Muggles?  Where does magic come from?  Why do some people have more of it than others?  What is it for?  Why are there different kinds of magic?  And what did our ancestors do with it and why?  The Department is full of magical devices, some of them old that we have little or no understanding of them, and others that are newer but have potential that hasn't been fully explored yet.  For example - do you know what a Time-Turner is?"

"Yeah - it's a device that allows you to go back in time," Ron said impatiently.  "I'm not stupid!"

"But do you know what happens when you go back in time?" Remus asked.  Ron blinked and the man smiled.  "The person you are - here and now, in this minute - isn't supposed to exist half an hour ago.  If you turned a Time-Turner now and went back half an hour in time, you'd be in the same place twice.  What does that do to you?  What does it do to the you that you were half an hour ago?  What does it do to the world?"

"What does it do to the structure of time itself?" Peter added.  "We don't know enough about time to be sure - it could cause terrible damage.  People _have_ caused terrible damage by going back in time.  You could go back days or years, and no matter how careful you were not to change anything, just by being there you would change something.  What does that do to the universe?"

"That's just one of the things we studied at the Department," Sirius added.

"And Time-Turners are a relatively recent invention," Peter continued.  "There are literally thousands of devices our ancestors created that we know so little about.  One of them is the Arch."

Ron was interested to see that several of them flinched very slightly at the mention of it, and even Dumbledore seemed to draw in a slow, very deep breath.

"What's the Arch?" he asked.

"It lies at the centre of a room known as the Death Chamber," James replied after a moment.  "As far as we know, it's always been there - it wasn't brought there by anyone, the Ministry was built up around it.  It's a long way below ground level and cautious estimates date it to a little bit earlier than the first circle of Stonehenge.  It's made of stone … it's just that, an arch.  There's a bit of old cloth hanging from it, so I suppose it's a bit like an … an entrance.  You can see through it from one side to the other."

"If you stand near enough to it, you can hear things," Remus said.  "Whispering …  That alone makes it quite dangerous, because if you don't know what to expect it's perfectly natural to want to get close to it to try and hear what it says.  And it's very dangerous to get close to it."

Ron felt the hair at the back of his neck prickle.  "Why is it dangerous?"

"Because if you step through the Arch, you don't come back," Peter said.  Of all of them, he seemed the calmest talking about it.  "Throw something through it and it doesn't appear on the other side.  It goes … somewhere else.  We don't know where, but most authorities agree that living things die when they pass its threshold."

"But how can you know?"

"Because at least once a generation a researcher will ignore all the advice and step through it," James replied grimly.  "Clairvoyants report having conversations with them later, although how reliable that is I don't know.  Clairvoyancy isn't a reputable branch of magical practice."

"Clairvoyancy's a load of dung," Ron said at once, scornfully.  "Gran says so and she should know!  You can't talk to the dead - they're _gone_.  Unless they're ghosts."

"Certain individuals dispute your grandmother's certainty on the subject," Dumbledore told him mildly.  His eyes had begun to twinkle again.  "Some surprisingly lively debates have been held about it over the years, and strong opinions aired."  In a disinterested tone he added, "I believe Mrs. Prewett even had words with Cassandra Trelawney about it."

"Is that what they got into a cat-fight about?" Ron asked.  It was nice to clear _that_ mystery up.  He couldn't help letting out a rude crack of laughter though.  "How long did Trelawney live afterwards?"

This produced a few raised brows and Harry gave him a startled look.  "That's nice!"

Ron snorted.  "You're kidding me, right?  Gran's about as sweet as barbed wire - all the Prewetts are like that.  If she got into it with Madam Trelawney, then it's Trelawney who shouted for mercy first!"  He took a swallow of his tea, and grinned suddenly.  "She scared the crap out of the manager at the Pink Kneazle and I reckon she wasn't even trying that time."

"The Pink Kneazle?" Lily asked, bewildered.

"Ron's last job," James told her.

"But isn't that club a - "

"I was fixing sex toys for them," Ron explained, and he was rather pleased by her shocked expression.  The ability to shock these people somehow gave him a certain limited power and he liked that feeling; it allowed him to feel as though he had a tiny amount of control over his situation at last.

"I don't believe the disagreement about the merits of clairvoyancy was the defining moment of your grandmother's quarrel with Madam Trelawney," Dumbledore told Ron gently.  "I'm sure it didn't help matters, though."

This was rather disappointing.  "So what did they fight about?"

"You, I believe."  Dumbledore sipped his tea tranquilly in the silence that suddenly fell.

Ron had the oddest sensation of quicksand under his feet.  "They never.  Why would they fight about me?  I never met Cassandra Trelawney, she died before I was born!"

"I imagine it was something to do with the mark you bear on your back, among other things," Dumbledore said.  The smile he gave Ron was kindly, but his eyes were sharp.

"It's just a birthmark," Ron said tersely.  "How would she know about it anyway?"

"True, it is a birthmark inasmuch as it's a mark you've carried since your birth.  There is, of course, far more to it than that."

"No there isn't - it's just an ugly mark - "

"It's not ugly," Harry said quietly.

"And it's not just a mark," Peter added.  "I did a drawing of it after you showed it to us at Yule.  The drawing alone pulled power out of the air around it, so your birthmark probably does the same.  Plus your grandmother drew your horoscope when you were born, but locked the entry on the Divinatory Register so that no one could read it except you.  Everyone else in your family has a horoscope that's publicly available, but all your entry has is the date you were born."

"From your reaction I would deduce that you know nothing of the contents of your horoscope either?" Dumbledore asked.  "Your grandmother has not mentioned it to you?"

"Nope, and that's fine by me," Ron said.  What the hell?  He didn't need to know this!  He didn't _want_ to know this.

"Don't you want to know?" Sirius asked, disbelieving.  "Two major seers had an epic handbag fight over you! Aren't you the slightest bit curious why?"

If he was, no one would ever know - not even Harry.  "Gran fights with everyone," he said coolly.  Everyone but him, he realised, but he wasn't going to mention that either.  "We hardly ever see her because she can't get along with Mum, and my uncles are both scared of her.  It doesn't surprise _me_ that she didn't get along with Cassandra Trelawney."

"You might _have_ to be a little bit curious about your birthmark if you're to work with us, Ron," Remus said into the quiet that followed this.  "Peter's an arithmancer and he specialises in tracking and measuring magical energies.  If he says your birthmark is pulling power out of the air, then it _is._   In the work we do we deal directly with magical power lines and flows.  We can't afford to take the risk that a mark on you is influencing the ambient magic around us.  You're going to have to let us investigate that possibility if nothing else, or you won't be able to work with us."

How had he gone from feeling confident to trapped so quickly?  Ron stared around at them and felt himself break out into a cold sweat.  His birthmark was _personal_.  He still wasn't sure how he'd allowed himself to be lured into showing it to people at Yule and he certainly didn't want anyone other than Harry examining it in any detail.  It was just a birthmark.  Birthmarks didn't 'pull power' out of the air.

"I did hope you might talk to your grandmother about it," Lily remarked rather sadly.  "I'm sure she knows a lot more about it than anyone else."

"Gran doesn't talk to people about stuff unless she wants to," Ron said, wishing this didn't sound so stupid.  Actually, he hadn't asked her because his mother had done her best to prevent him having any in-depth conversations with Granny Prewett at Christmas, and after the Pink Kneazle incident he'd been cross enough with her for losing him his job that he hadn't considered discussing things with her.  Not that she had been very forthcoming even in the everyday stuff.

"Seers do have a habit of refusing to discuss prophecies and the like," Dumbledore said unexpectedly.  He was studying Ron over the top of his half-moon spectacles in a rather unnerving way.  "They prefer not to interfere with the future, believing that once it has been Seen it is somehow unchangeable and should not be tampered with, which is why very often - and rather frustratingly - they will refuse even to divulge a prophecy, or will express it in such oblique terms that it becomes useless to the listener.  This is not helped by the Ministry's policy of sealing prophecies to all but the subjects of them."  He paused.  "You are not a seer yourself, I suppose?"

Ron blinked.  "Me?  No, sir!"

"Ah.  Interesting.  The gift is inherited, you see, and Lillian Prewett is far from the first of her family to be a seer.  One of the reasons her kindred all have horoscopes entered into the Divinatory Register is due to the possibility of one of her descendents being born with the gift.  The fact that she chose to lock your entry did rather make me wonder if that was why."  Dumbledore gave him another sharp look.  "What of your brothers and sister?"

Ron grudgingly considered the question.  If Ginny had the gift, they would have all known about it by now, it wasn't as though she was shy about her achievements.  Impossible to tell with the twins, but it seemed unlikely.  Percy didn't see anything beyond the tip of his nose; and besides, he was their mother's favourite.  If he'd been born with the gift, it would suddenly have been something marvellous.  Charlie?  Charlie was the most normal bloke Ron knew.  And Bill ... well, who could tell?  But Ron didn't think so, for one simple reason:

"If any of us were born with it, I reckon Gran would have known and done something about it," he said, and Dumbledore nodded his agreement.

"True - I must agree with that assessment.  She may be very circumspect, but Lillian is not irresponsible."

There was a pause, but finally James broke the silence.  "Look, we could speculate on this all day, but we don't really have the leisure for it.  Ron - I understand why you don't want people nosing around in things that must seem personal to you, all right?  So I think that for the moment the question of what's in your horoscope and what it had to do with your grandmother and Madam Trelawney should just be left alone.  Maybe at some point you'll feel up to looking into it, but for now that's up to you as far as I'm concerned."

Ron noticed that it was always James who seemed to lead the group, and wondered if that was an official thing or just the way it had developed between them.  Either way, if it meant that he didn't have to poke around in things he didn't want to poke around then it worked for him.

And perhaps James wasn't as annoying as he'd initially believed.

"We can't ignore the birthmark," Peter said to James flatly.

"I know - agreed."  James looked at Ron.  "Will you at least let us examine your birthmark to try and get an idea of what's going on with it?"

Ron's immediate reaction was to say no, but before he could refuse Harry gripped his elbow gently but insistently.  Green eyes entreated him when he turned to look.

"No one's going to mess with it or hurt you," Harry said.  He squeezed Ron's arm gently for emphasis.  "You know I wouldn't let anything like that happen, don't you?"

"It's not that," Ron muttered.

"I know - I know how you feel about it.  But we're working with all sorts of power, some of it messed up and dirty with Dark magic.  If your birthmark really _is_ pulling magic from the air and stuff, it could put you in danger."

"If it was pulling power into me, don't you think I'd know about it?"

"That depends where it's going, doesn't it?"

This idea was so creepy that Ron really wished Harry hadn't voiced it.  "You make it sound like it's some sort of separate _thing_ that's doing stuff all on its own!" he hissed.

"I don't believe it's _doing_ anything," Harry hissed back.  "It is what it is, Ron!  The Cerne Abbas Giant attracts power to it - it's not alive, it's just an image cut into the hill, but the shape and the intentions of the people who made it make the image draw power to it.  Like the runes you draw to make wards.  It's all the same."

"It's not a fucking rune!  Nobody drew it!  _It's on my back._ "

"Wouldn't you feel better about it if you knew what it really is?"  Harry's eyes held his.  "You've been hiding it all your life - why?"

"Because people act freaky about it!"  Ron glared at him.  Harry knew all this, dammit.

"Most people don't even know it's there, so how can they react to it at all?" Harry asked reasonably.  A curious expression flickered in his eyes for a moment.  "You've been letting it control you instead of dealing with it, you know."

"Fuck you, Potter - "  Ron tried to pull away, but Harry still had a firm grip on his arm and refused to release him.

"Why don't you _take_ control of it instead of letting it control you?"

"It's not controlling me!"

"Yeah, it is.  It controls you every time you decide not to take your shirt off.  Coward!"

Ron very nearly lashed out at him.  Then he suddenly remembered where he was and was horrified to realise that this argument had been played out in front of six pairs of interested eyes.  Having a knock-down-and-drag-out fight with Harry was one thing; having it in front of an audience, especially _this_ audience, was something else entirely.  It took a real effort of will to do it, but he dragged his temper back under control, resumed his usual bland expression, and sat down again. 

Until then he hadn't realised he'd stood up in the first place.

"Are you going to let go of my arm?" he asked Harry as mildly as he could manage.

"Are you going to stop being an arse?" Harry retorted.

The anger bubbled up again sharply, then he saw the look on Harry's face.  His brows twitched upwards mockingly and he stuck his tongue in his cheek like a challenge.

So it was like that, was it?  Ron snorted, vowing to wipe that smug mischief off his friend's face very thoroughly - later, when they were alone and he could do a proper job of it, and preferably in a way that would remind Harry of who was in charge the next time he tried to sit on a broomstick.  He would enjoy that.

The expressions on the adults in the room were mixed when he turned back to face them.  Sirius was watching them with open and unabashed enjoyment, as though the argument had been staged for his personal entertainment (somehow this didn't surprise Ron at all), and Remus looked as though he was amused and trying to hide it.  Dumbledore was tranquilly sipping his tea as though nothing of any great moment had just occurred; Peter had got his little bag of casting bones out and was toying with it.  Lily looked concerned.  And James ... 

James's expression was unreadable, but when he saw that he had their attention he said with somewhat forced patience, "So - do we get to look at your birthmark again, or do I send an owl to your brother for him to come and get you?"

"My brother?" Ron said blankly.

"Your brother Bill has been doing some work for me in London," Dumbledore put in mildly.  "If you would prefer it - if you are not comfortable with what we ask of you here - then I feel sure he would be glad of your assistance.  Or you may return home, of course."  In a rather apologetic tone he added, "Unfortunately, either option would severely limit your opportunities for contact with Harry.  He has work to do here with us."

"Are you blackmailing me?" Ron blurted out incredulously before he could stop himself.  Then he remembered who he was speaking to and coloured up.  "Sir."

Sirius tried unsuccessfully to hide a laugh under a cough at this belated attempt to mitigate the accusation, but Dumbledore only looked at Ron over his spectacles with a smile.

"Not at all, dear boy - merely presenting you with all the available information, to assist you in your decision!"

Ron just managed to suppress a sarcastic retort, but he couldn't help eyeing the old man with suspicion.  If this was manipulation, it was pretty blatant.  What sort of choices were these?  Not that the thought of working with Bill was unattractive, but not to see Harry?  The past year had been slow torture, and Ron wasn't stupid - he didn't give out much hope for the chances of their relationship if he only saw Harry once every few months.  And he needed him, Harry understood him and kept him sane.

But they wanted to mess with that damned _thing_ on his back ... 

Ron really wished that his attempt to hex the birthmark off when he was twelve had been successful.  Unfortunately not; all it had resulted in was a nasty case of sunburn and a scolding from Madam Pomfrey, but he still felt the principle was basically sound.  He really should have tried again, but Harry's soothing acceptance the first time he saw the mark had lured Ron into a false sense of security.  He should have known it couldn't last.

"Nobody's going to mess with your birthmark," Harry told him, as though he could read Ron's mind and see what was bothering him.  "They only want to look at it and see if it really is ... causing a power shift or something.  It's just to make sure you're safe, okay?  I won't let anyone mess with it."

The frustrating thing was that when it came down to it, there really wasn't a choice.

"Yeah, all right, whatever," Ron muttered ungraciously, and the tension in the room lightened considerably.

"Your trust in us is appreciated and will not be abused," Dumbledore said gravely, and he flicked his wand at the teapot.  "I think more tea is in order."  The pot began to circulate among them.  "Now ... what next?"

"I don't think we finished explaining the end of the war to Ron," Remus said, blowing gently on his tea to cool it.

"Ah yes - thank you!  Yes ..."  Dumbledore sighed.  "The Arch and its properties.  Peter, will you continue?"

Peter put his cup down and sat forward again.  "I think we agreed that most experts believe the Arch kills anyone who goes through it, right?  Only now we're starting to have doubts about that, and not just because we can't be sure clairvoyants really do speak to the dead."

Ron would have liked the opportunity to be grumpy about his capitulation on the matter of his birthmark, but he was too interested in the story of the Arch to bother.  "So what makes you think it _doesn't_ kill people?  Did someone come back?"

"Not exactly," Remus said.  "It's more a case of something we think the Arch is doing - or something on the other side of the Arch, possibly, although that's pure speculation."

"Everything points that way," James said impatiently.  "Look, Ron, this is the problem: when we started work on cleaning the ley-lines, it was understood that it was a finite problem - it wasn't something we were going to spend the rest of our lives doing, in other words.  As far as we knew, there was only a small number of sites where the lines had been tampered with - but it didn't pan out that way.  Some of the sites we're cleaning now we've cleaned before, and the problems we're encountering are becoming more difficult to counteract.  Stuff that used to take a day or so to sort out now takes weeks.  And on top of that a lot of the ley-lines that were already plotted - some of them were mapped centuries ago - have suddenly shifted position or changed in nature, becoming stronger or weaker or even changing their direction of flow."

"And the Arch is doing something to them?"

"We're getting ahead of the game here," Sirius said.  "The thing you have to realise, Ron, is that when we faced off against Voldemort and some of his followers, we deliberately cornered them in the Death Chamber so that we could force him to go through the Arch."

"I got that," Ron said dryly.  It had been fairly obvious from the moment they told him what it did.

"It was the best way we could think of to get rid of him," Lily said.  "There wouldn't be a body left behind and anything he took with him, like his wand, would go too.  We would have settled for killing him, but there was always a risk that he might survive somehow or that his body would be retrieved by his followers and ... tampered with.  The worst possible outcome would be his capture, because none of us believed Azkaban could hold him and then it would all have to be done again."

"Believe me, he's not someone you'd want to face twice," James said.  He grimaced.  "Most people were lucky to survive _one_ encounter."

"But he went through the Arch?"

"Oh yes."

"Along with a couple of his less likeable followers," Remus commented.  "We weren't sorry to see the back of Antonin Dolohov or Bellatrix Lestrange, believe me."

Sirius made a face over his teacup.

Ron looked around.  "So what's the problem if they went through the Arch?"

"It's a couple of things," Lily said with a sigh.  "Firstly, there was a big magical blast that came out of the Arch after Voldemort went through - that's never happened before, as far as we know.  Usually people and objects just ... fade away.  The wave of power that came out rocked the whole building, although the warding around the department localised most of the damage.  But the whole area was … contaminated … by the blast, and because the department was immediately sealed off to contain it we were never able to investigate what caused the blast in the first place.  And then there's the ley-lines."

"Many of the ley-lines the Death Eaters tampered with have begun to move, warp and realign themselves," Dumbledore explained.  "They quite strenuously resist our efforts to correct them.  And they are all aligning themselves in the direction of the Ministry - worse, they are beginning to affect other ley-lines in the network, slowly pulling others into alignment with them.  Magical power has begun to flow _towards_ the Ministry and those of us who still have access to the building have found that the lines are aligning themselves specifically in the direction of the wall that seals off the former Department of Mysteries."

"Even more worryingly, some of them later change polarity," Lily said.  "In other words, they start carrying magic _out_ from the Arch and there's something wrong with the magic they carry.  That in turn affects other lines as the power is carried across the net, and we're having a lot of difficulty in cleansing them.  They're steadily growing in number and soon we won't be able to keep up with it."

"Power doesn't flow in or out of the Arch under normal circumstances," Peter said.  "That's one of its oddities.  It radiates its own static magical field for a distance of about three yards in every direction around it, but you can get within an inch or two of the veil before the void between the pillars of the Arch actually affects anything that touches it."  The corner of his mouth quirked.  "An awful lot of rulers and tape-measures have been lost by people who tried to measure the depth.  You have to be pretty quick to let go, too - at least one researcher lost a hand because he tried to hang onto his tape-measure when the field grabbed it.  His colleagues had to cut it off to prevent him being pulled through too.  But if you were to cast a hex into the void, it'd just come out the other side."

"So why are the ley-lines moving towards it?" Ron asked.

"We don't know," James said.  He looked frustrated.  "That's the most alarming part of this, really.  We can't investigate!  No one's interested when you try to talk to them about ley-lines and the Minister is adamant that no one opens up the Department of Mysteries again.  Mention Death Eaters and Voldemort and at best you get accused of being an hysterical troublemaker."

"At worst, you suddenly find Aurors and Hitwizards asking your friends and neighbours uncomfortable questions about you," Sirius said.  "And if you're _really_ naughty, people follow you everywhere and sometimes even accuse you of heinous crimes, like - oh, I don't know - not having a licence for your flying motorbike?"

"You're never going to forget that, are you?" James said to him with a sudden grin.

"What good would that do them?" Ron asked, bemused.

"Harassment," Harry said.

"It's when they don't harass us that I worry," Remus added.  "A few years ago there was a period where the watching seemed to stop for a while, but just as we were heaving a sigh of relief Peter got arrested and the Aurors held him for nearly three days without letting anyone know where he was."

"We were getting ready to bust him out of Azkaban," Sirius said, flashing a quick grin at Peter.

"Fortunately, Peter's reputation and appearance are quite at odds with his actual abilities," Dumbledore observed.  "He was eventually released without any charge or explanation, but since then we have exercised even greater caution."

"If you join us, you'll have to accept the same level of risk and caution," James warned Ron.  "They weren't too rough on Peter, but they probably won't be as nice to the rest of us."

"But if they don't think the ley-lines are important, why are they making trouble for you?" Ron asked.

There was a round of rolled eyes and wry looks.

"Not all of the Death Eaters were captured," Harry reminded him.  "Some of them got away with it and even work at the Ministry now.  They know Dad and the others were there when Voldemort got forced through the Arch and they interfere - they even have the ear of the Minister."

"Like who?" Ron demanded.

"I could write you a list," Sirius said, "but let's just go with the big one, since he has his fingers in everything and it's almost certainly him setting the Hitwizards on us."

"Lucius Malfoy," James said bitterly.

Ron twitched; he couldn't help it, even though he managed to keep his face still, and although the others showed no sign of having seen his reaction, he knew that Harry must have noticed.

"Draco's old man," he said sourly, hoping this would cover him.

"You know what he's doing these days?" Harry said.  "Draco, I mean."

"Cleaning the bogs on Platform Nine and Three Quarters?" Ron asked hopefully, and Sirius laughed.

"No such luck.  He's apprenticed to Ludo Bagman at the Department of Magical Games and Sports."  Harry was bitter.  "Not some underling - Bagman himself!  Apparently he didn't even have to sit the Ministry entrance exam - one word from Daddy and everything was golden for him."

Ron's temper soured even further, to a point where he almost wondered why his anger wasn't smashing up the china cups and saucers.  He quickly put his own cup down before he crushed it physically.  "I took that exam," he remarked and he was rather surprised at how casual he sounded even to his own ears.  "I failed the interview afterwards though."

"I'm thinking Draco's interview was more like drinks before dinner," Harry said grumpily.  "Bagman's a pillock anyway.  Too many Bludgers to the head, probably."

"Ludovic Bagman was a Death Eater," Dumbledore said mildly.  "Not a very important or active one, I think, but merely the fact that he was would be enough for a man like Lucius to control him."

Ron came to a decision.  Possibly he would regret being so forthcoming later, but -

"Lucius Malfoy's a member of the Pink Kneazle Club," he said.

There was a startled silence.  Then a big smile spread across Sirius's face.  "Ron, I love you."

"That is certainly an interesting piece of information, given his political persuasions," Dumbledore said thoughtfully.  "Not entirely a surprise, although I confess I hadn't thought it of him until now.  Might I ask, Ronald, how you know this?  I believe you were only employed in a maintenance position at the establishment?"

"He got stuck in one of Triton's bits of equipment one night," Ron explained.  He didn't feel equal to explaining the full details in such mixed company.  "I had to get him out of it."

"Did he see you?" James asked sharply.

"No - he was wearing a mask that blindfolded him and I didn't say anything while I was in there.  I'm not even sure if he knew someone else was in the room.  Triton was, um, doing stuff to him at the time."

"How did you know it was him?" Remus asked.

"I met him a couple of times when he came to see Draco at school," Ron said, "and he has this tattoo on his shoulder - Draco has an identical one, I think it's some kind of family crest."

"Nice!" Harry said, and he made a face.  "What about his wife?"

"It's not unusual," Sirius said, with a shrug.  "He may even have a mistress or two as well.  My father was a member of the Pink Kneazle, but he had women on the side.  I don't think my mother cared.  It's not like she married the love of her life, after all - it was arranged and she was probably just glad to have him off her hands."

"Yeah, great," James said impatiently.  "The important question is - can we use this information?"

"God, I hope so," Ron mumbled.

Harry shot him a quick half-smile.  "Which god?" he murmured back.

"Interesting," Dumbledore said.  "But for the moment it's merely illustrative of Lucius's character I fear."

James made a face.

"Which isn't to say it couldn't become useful later," Lily consoled him.

"What were you going to use it for, Ron?" Remus asked him innocently.

Ron looked up sharply.  "Me?"

"You're a smart lad.  It must have been quite a temptation, knowing something like that about a man like Malfoy."

"I signed an agreement not to reveal stuff like that!"

"And you just broke it by telling us," Sirius pointed out, grinning.

Ron scowled.

"When did you find out about Malfoy?" James asked him.

"A few days before Gran turned up."

"Another mystery solved," Peter said.  He laid the casting bones out on the floor beside him and began to pick over them.

"What mystery?" Ron demanded, annoyed all over again.

"Your grandmother told me she took you away from the club because you were about to make a decision that would get you into serious trouble," James told him.

"No I wasn't!" Ron said, exasperated.  "Why did she have to meddle?  I told her, I can look after myself!"

"She obviously thought she had a good reason," Lily said, smiling a little.

"Well, she didn't.  I'd already changed my mind."

"What were you going to do if you hadn't?" Harry asked.  If he was amused by Ron's remark, he didn't show it.

Ron shrugged.  "Nothing."  They didn't need to know about his father's history with Malfoy.

Harry gave him a quizzical look.  "If you weren't going to do anything before you changed your mind, what were you going to do afterwards?"

Ron stared at him, perplexed.  "What?"

"You said … never mind."

There was a pause, and then Dumbledore sighed a little. 

"Well, we seem to have reached a crossroads in the conversation, my friends.  Are we decided on what to do next?  Peter, you have the details of the next location to work upon.  Lily, you have your assignment - "

"I'll need your letter of introduction again," Lily said apologetically.  "You know what he's like - he'll pretend that he never saw me before if I don't have it."

"Of course, of course …"

"Mum and Dumbledore travel around Europe tracking down experts in all sorts of magic and trying to work out what happened at the Ministry," Harry whispered to Ron when Ron raised an enquiring brow.

"And Ronald …"

"Sir?" Ron looked up, startled.

Dumbledore smiled.  "Doing unpleasant jobs that we would rather _not_ do is better done straight away, I find.  Before you all leave here, I hope you will allow us to examine your birthmark - very carefully, of course - and attempt to discover if it holds any magical significance."

Ron felt no great enthusiasm for this, but he had agreed after all, so he nodded.

"Excellent."  Dumbledore flicked his wand and the dirty teacups scuttled back to the tray, where they huddled around the teapot like ducklings.  Another flick of the wand and the whole tray vanished, along with the empty biscuit plate.  He smiled around at his guests benignly.  "Well, shall we be about it?"

Harry looked at Ron and smiled.  "Take your shirt off."

 **_\- finis -_ **


End file.
